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Presented to the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
LIBRARY
bif the
ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE
LIBRARY
1980
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
THE NEXT WAR SERIES
Edited by Captain Liddell Hart
Sea Power in the Next War, by Commander Russell
Grenfell, R.N.
Air Power in the Next War, by J. M. Spaight, C.B., C.B.E.
Propaganda in the Next War, by Captain Sidney Rogerson.
" Tanks in the Next War, by Major E. W. Sheppard, O.B.E.,
M.C.
Infantry in the Next War, by Colonel E. E. Dorman Smith,
M.C.
Gas in the Next War, by Major-General Sir Henry F.
Thuillier, K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O.
The Territorial in the Next War, by Major-General Sir
John Brown, K.C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O.
The Civilian in the Next War, by Jonathan Griffin.
THE NEXT WAR
a series edited by
CAPTAIN LIDDELL HART
Sea Power
in the next war
by
COMMANDER RUSSELL GRENFELL
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GEOFFREY BLES
TWO MANCHESTER SQUARE, LONDON, W.i
First published in 1938
PRINTED IM GREAT BRITAIN BY
MACKAYS LIMITED, CHATHAM
CONTENTS
CRAP.
PACS
Editor's Preface . . . vii
I. Sea Power in the Last War . i
II. The Lessons of the War . . i8
III. General Developments Since the
War 35
IV. Technical Developments Since
THE War .... 52
V. The Development of the Air
Weapon 63
VI. Invasion 80
VII. The Defence of Trade . . 88
VIII. OiR Mediterranean Communi-
cations . . . . .107
IX. Oceanic Communications . .119
X. The Future of the Big Ship . 131
XI. The Merchant Fleet . . .153
XII. The Imperial Defence Problem . 161
Index ..... 181
V
EDITOR'S PREFACE
Modern war has too wide an effect for its practice
to be treated as a " mystery." Statesmen may
direct it ; generals, admirals and air marshals may
manage its operations — but every citizen, man or
woman, is perforce a shareholder. The more they
know about the way it is conducted the better for
their security. The aim of this series is primarily
to enlighten the intelligent public as to the pro-
babilities of a future war in its various spheres, if
it is hoped that the military reader also may find
some stimulus to thought, about his problems.
Although twenty years have passed since the
last great war ended, it left so deep an imprint that
we are apt to overlook the fact that few of the men
now under arms, and fewer still of those who might
be called on, have any personal acquaintance with
war. The natural consequences are to be seen in
any of the exercises carried out by the Regular and
the Territorial Army during the annual training
season. On these battlefields without bullets or
shells, many things are done which would be
impossible under actual fire — and without their
impossibility even being perceived. The unreality
is often increased because the situations on which
exercises are based have themselves an air of
vii
editor's preface
improbability. This is due largely to a tendency,
natural in those who are practising any particular
technique, to think of war in bits instead of as a
whole. They find it difficult to visualise the effect
on their bit that others may produce, with the
result that the picture is distorted. The best
ct>rrective to the particularist tendency is to view
each aspect of war against a wider background.
This series of volumes, in which different
aspects are treated as far as possible in relation to
each other, may help to form such a background.
Sea Power in the Next War is treated by Com-
mander Russell Grenfell who was recently on the
teaching staff of the Royal Naval College, Green-
wich. It was only last year that he published his
first book. The Art of the Admiral, but it placed
him immediately in the front rank of naval writers.
The attention it attracted, both from the public
and the experts, was the more remarkable because
it was in no way sensational, making its impression
simply by the clarity of the reasoning, and the
lucidity of the writing.
His present study of the wider problems of sea
power has the same qualities. The balanced
treatment of the subject as a whole gives, however,
the more emphasis to his discussion of the risks
that are being courted by the ** large ship " policy,
and to his proposals for the development of a
" destroyer fleet."
• • •
vni
CHAPTER I
SEA POWER IN THE LAST WAR
It was surprising enough that just before the last
war a distinguished French soldier such as Foch
could so ill-appreciate the value of sea power in
war as actually to be capable of rating the British
Navy as not worth one bayonet to the Entente
Cause. It was very much more surprising that an
influential British General, Sir Henry Wilson,
could apparently agree with him. There may
have been some excuse for the Frenchman with
his eyes on the Franco-German frontier and his
back to the sea. There was no excuse at all for
the soldier of a country that owes almost every-
thing to the sea and sea power ; its trade, its
overseas possessions, its security from foreign
aggression. That Sir Henry Wilson's acquiescence
in the disparagement of sea power was possible
at all demonstrates the extreme danger of our
pre-war system of allowing the armed forces
to pursue their study of war in sectional seclusion.
The war resolved any doubts that may have
existed in peace time, and gave to two nations in
I
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
particular a severe lesson in the power of navies
and the part they could play in war if effectively
employed. The submarine attack on its sea-
borne supplies very nearly starved the British
nation into submission, while the blockade of
Germany is never likely to be forgotten by the
war generation of that country ; a generation
that tried to exist for many months on half
rations of diminishing supplies of food or rather
food substitute and that saw its children growing
up rickety and defective through under-nourish-
ment. It is indeed the recollection of the British
blockade of Germany that is the direct cause of
the endeavour being made even now by so many
countries to be as economically self-sufficient as
possible. Again, it is to the fact that the command
at sea was in our hands in the last war that is due
our present mandatory possession of most of the
former German overseas colonies. All over the
world British and Dominion troops were trans-
ported by sea to wrest those colonies from
Germany, and the latter with an inferior fleet
was powerless to succour them.
But though there is no reason to think that
sea power will be any less important in the next
war than it has been in previous ones, it is a
different matter when we come to consider the
means whereby that power will be exerted.
The circumstances of any war are never quite
2
SEA POWER IN THE LAST WAR
the same as those of the previous one, and the
more the general speed of Hfe increases and the
faster therefore that material progress takes place,
the more pronounced is likely to be the distinction
between one war and the next following one. The
great technical improvements in aircraft since
the war will, for instance, readily come to mind
as one factor that is sure to have an influence,
probably a far-reaching influence, over future
naval operations. But though they may attract
less attention, developments are nevertheless
taking place all the time in other directions as
well ; in guns and gunnery, in torpedoes, in
mining, in the construction of ships to withstand
underwater explosion, and so on. The pieces that
will be lined up on the nautical chess-board in the
event of another war will not therefore be quite
the same pieces as were used in the previous
game and they will in some cases be capable
of novel moves. While any such changes in the
nature and capabilities of the chess-man must
naturally bring changes in the way the game is
played, they will not alter the general principles
governing the game itself. The object will still
be to checkmate the opponent's king or whatever
represents it in the new alignment. Moreover
the board will be the same as before. In deciding
therefore how the game is likely to be played
in the future, a useful preliminary will probably
3
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
be to notice how it was played on the last occasion
when the board was set out.
The material object of the Navy in 19 14 was
the same as it had always been and still is ; namely,
to control the use of the sea highways for our-
selves and to deny them to the enemy. This
control of the sea highways, if obtained, can be
utilised in four principal ways. It can be used
to blockade the enemy by cutting off his sea-
borne supplies ; to maintain our own ; to
secure our coasts from invasion by preventing
the passage of enemy troops across the sea ; and
to cover the passage of any military expedition
that we might wish to send outside the United
Kingdom.
The methods put into force at the beginning
of the war to achieve the main object were very
much the same as they had been in the past.
Actually, the problem was in many ways an easier
one to tackle than on most previous occasions,
by reason of the extremely favourable geographical
position enjoyed by Great Britain vis-a-vis
Germany. The British Isles stood like a gigantic
breakwater across the approaches to Germany,
narrowing down the channels of access to and
egress from her ports to the Straits of Dover
in the south and the area between Scotland and
Iceland in the north. To close these channels
against supplies destined for Germany was not
4
SEA POWER IN THE LAST WAR
difficult. The Straits of Dover were clearly
impassable, since it was alive with the vessels of
the Dover Patrol. To guard the northern route
round Scotland, we stretched a line of ships
between the Orkneys and Iceland, which kept
up a patrol day and night, winter and summer,
until the Armistice. This was the celebrated
Northern Patrol and, despite the long nights and
the Arctic gales of the winter months, very few
ships slipped through its hands. It is true that
it was open to ships to go round the north of
Iceland ; but what with ice, fierce currents, and
unlighted coasts, there were few that cared to
make the attempt.
The same favourable geographical position also
assisted the Navy in its defensive task of protecting
our own shipping. Operating from bases well
beyond the home terminals of British trade,
German warships had first of all to get clear of
the North Sea before they could attack the
main mass of our sea-borne trade ; all, that
is, except the comparatively trifling amount that
passed across the North Sea to and from Scandi-
navia. To get clear they had to pass through one
or other of the two aforementioned channels,
the southern of which was watched by the Dover
Patrol and the northern by the Grand Fleet at
Scapa Flow. The British having the advantage
of interior lines, the chances of any substantial
5
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
body of German men-of-war breaking out of
the North Sea without being brought to action
were small. The Grand Fleet was in fact acting
as cover to all our maritime interests to the
westward against a German attack in force. The
merchant ships in the Channel, the ships passing
up and down the coast of Spain and through
the Mediterranean, those in the Indian Ocean
and indeed all over the world were being covered
against attack from the High Seas Fleet by the
British battleships in Scapa.
But though the main portion of the enemy fleet
was thus held in check, complete immunity could
not be expected, any more than it had been in
the past. There could never be an absolute
guarantee that individual raiders would not be
able to slip out and get away into the open ocean.
Moreover, at the time the war started, the German
ships which formed the normal peace time
squadrons on foreign stations were all potential
raiders, who being well clear of the restrictive
influence of the Grand Fleet, were in a position
to commence operations against trade at once,
as most of them did.
Against the hostile activities of these early
raiders who were already on the trade routes,
and of others later on in the war who managed
or might manage to elude our watch on the
exits from the North Sea, the general cover
6
SEA POWER IN THE LAST WAR
afforded by the Grand Fleet was unavailing,
and counter-measures had to be devised on the
spot. Of such counter-measures, the experience
of the past offered two alternatives. One was the
system of convoy, under which merchant ships
were collected into groups and given an escort
of warships to accompany them throughout
their voyage or as far as danger was deemed to
exist. The other was to leave merchant ships
to sail independently and to provide a roving
garrison of warships for any desired trade area to
patrol up and down or go off in search of any
enemy that might be reported. This was known
as the Cruising System. It so happened that
during the latter years of peace immediately
preceding the outbreak of the war a strong
prejudice had grown up against the convoy system
as a means of protecting trade. While, therefore,
it was used even in the early days of the war
for guarding the passage of troop transports, the
Admiralty remained resolutely averse to using
it for the protection of mercantile shipping. The
cruising or patrolling system was consequently
the one brought into use at the outset of the war
for this purpose.
As there was no knowing at what point in all
the immense areas of ocean traversed by our
shipping a raider would choose to appear, the
number of warships allocated for trade protection
7
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
duty was bound to be large. Cruising vessels had
necessarily to be stationed, if not in every area,
at all events in every area where attack would
be embarrassing. In the same way, by reason
of their great intrinsic importance, escort was
rec[uired for any military expeditions during their
passage across the sea. The employment of all
these vessels on protection duty, together with
those engaged in intercepting enemy shipping
or neutrals carrying contraband, necessarily
entailed great dispersion. Anyone able to look
down on the world from the stratosphere in
1914 would have seen odd cruisers dotted about
in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans,
on patrol or making for the last reported position
of a raider. In the South Indian Ocean he might
have seen three or four armoured or light cruisers
surrounding an Australian and New Zealand
troop convoy steering for Suez, and the same
thing might have been visible in the Atlantic
where the first Canadian contingent was crossing
to England. Up in the north, almost touching
the Arctic ice, would be seen the vessels of the
Northern Patrol spread perhaps 20 miles apart
on their ceaseless vigil, while the Dover Strait
and the Channel would be busy with patrolling
destroyers, sloops and other small craft. All
these ships would be engaged directly on the
work of controlling the use of the sea highways
8
SEA POWER IN THE LAST WAR
and can therefore be given the name of the
Control fleet.
The ships of the Control fleet would, as has been
said, be greatly scattered. Many would be by
themselves. Others might be in twos or threes.
Nowhere among them would be found any large
concentrated body. For this reason, they could
give no protection against any large concentrated
body of the enemy that might appear in their
area. The task of preventing these enemy con-
centrations getting away lay, as we have previously
seen, with the main battle fleet, whose duty it
was to ensure that they were brought to action
before they could do any serious harm. If the
battle fleet had failed in that, either by blunder
or defeat, the Control fleet and shipping under
its protection must have been cut to pieces.
A general survey of the naval war as it was
being waged in 1915 or 1916 would therefore
have taken the following form. Germany, as
the weaker power at sea, had had her own
commerce swept from the seas. The supplies
that constant endeavour was being made to send
to her in neutral bottoms were being intercepted
and examined by our Control vessels, and those
liable to seizure under the steadily tightening
contraband regulations were being impounded.
On the other hand, the trade routes of the world
were alive with British and neutral shipping
B 9
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
bringing commercial produce and all manner of
war materials to Great Britain and her allies.
Widely distributed among all this great stream
of shipping were the cruisers and other Control
vessels on the look out for any odd raiders that
might have slipped out of the North Sea to
attack the vitally important flow of allied trade.
Standing like a huge sentinel over all this
allied maritime activity was the British Grand
Fleet, with its eyes glued on the High Seas Fleet
on the other side of the North Sea, ready to
proceed on the instant to checkmate any move the
German Fleet might make. The latter, being the
weaker of the two combatants, was powerless to
interfere with the British control of the sea high-
ways unless and until it could defeat the Grand
Fleet that was watching it so closely from those
tide-swept Orkney Islands. How to defeat the
Grand Fleet and by that means to wrest the
control of the sea communications from our grasp
was, however, a problem that the High Seas Fleet
never solved.
These then were the main characteristics of the
war at sea during at all events the first half of the
war ; and in essentials they difi"ered little from
those of previous maritime struggles. In Nelson's
day there were the same enemy raiders attacking
trade and the same defending frigates and other
cruising vessels acting against them and applying
10
SEA POWER IN THE LAST WAR
at the same time the rules of contraband against
neutrals trading with the enemy. There were
also the same two sets of concentrated strength
in the shape of the rival battle fleets, the weaker
one lying impotently in its harbours, and the
stronger one watching either from close outside
or from a more distant anchorage to make sure that
the enemy fleet was brought to action if it tried
to break the pressure of the economic blockade. It
is true that the ships and the weapons had changed
out of all recognition since the days of sail. For
the most part, however, these mutations had not
affected the main principles of the game. The
surface torpedo vessel was after all not very
different in its nature from the fireship, while the
mine was almost as much a navigational as an
operational problem and had the result of turning
the North Sea into an area full of uncharted and
particularly dangerous shoals.
There was, however, one direction in which the
march of science had created new potentialities
altogether and had fashioned an instrument that
was to have a disturbing effect on the time-
honoured principles which had hitherto governed
the use of sea power. This instrument was the
submarine. At first, the possibilities of this vessel
had not been fully realised. That it was a formid-
able weapon for use against warships was
appreciated readily enough ; almost too readily.
II
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Being a type of vessel which was still in the embryo
stage when the war broke out, it had been regarded
before the war almost more from the academic
than from the practical point of view, as an
interesting innovation which might at some
future date merit serious consideration when its
capabilities were more fully established. This
attitude did not survive the outbreak of the war.
Though it had been the fashion before the war
among many of the more senior British naval
officers to treat the submarine with slightly
patronising unconcern, no sooner did war come
than the naval authorities became immediately
and acutely submarine-conscious. Within a
matter of days from the outbreak of hostilities,
the Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Jellicoe,
became so alarmed about the complete lack of
anti-submarine defences at the fleet base that
he would not consent to stay there any longer but
took his fleet away to the west coast of Scotland
where it would be out of submarine range until
Scapa was netted in. It was also far beyond the
point where it could mount an efficient guard over
the High Seas Fleet, which could, during this
period, have cut the British communications
with France with impunity, had it known of the
Grand Fleet's removal from the scene.
From that time onwards, the big ships went in
fear of the submarine, a fear which was not
12
SEA POWER IN THE LAST WAR
abated by such episodes as the sinking of the Hogue,
Cressy and Aboukir, of the Formidable, and other
ships. For the rest of the war, capital ships were
not deemed able to go to or keep at sea without
a screen of destroyers round them to frustrate
the submarine in making its attack. One result
of this was to reduce the effective fuel endurance
of the fleet to that of the destroyers that accom-
panied it ; which meant that battleships capable
of steaming 5,000 miles had to return to harbour
at the dictates of destroyers with a maximum
steaming range of 1,800.
For the first two years of the war, the Germans
utilised their new submarine weapon chiefly in
the attack on enemy surface warships. It was
natural in them to do so. The submarine appeared
to provide a particularly promising means whereby
the strength of the superior British battle fleet
might be whittled down to the point where the
High Seas Fleet could hope to seek a general
action with good prospects of decisive victory,
the achievement of which would of course knock
England out of the war at a stroke. Moreover,
one or two tentative attempts to use submarines
against commerce were met with that inter-
national hostility and condemnation that is
always meted out to the use of new weapons by a
world that is by nature apprehensive of the
unknown. A couple of years of warfare, however,
13
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
brought light to the Germans on two points.
One was that, even with the aid of the submarine,
there seemed Httle HlceUhood of effecting the
defeat of the British Fleet. With that realisation
came another one. If Germany's inferior surface
fleet could not fight its way out past the ever
t^atchful Grand Fleet to reach that happy hunting
ground where enemy trade was crov/ding thick
and plentiful into the narrow Channel approaches,
there was nothing to prevent submarines, the
first vessels in the history of the warship to
move in three dimensions, from diving under the
Grand Fleet to reach that same goal.
The decision was taken and the great German
unrestricted submarine campaign against com-
merce was launched. Its success was immediate.
Commencing on February ist, 1917, 300,000
tons of British shipping were sunk in the first
month, 350,000 in the second, and 550,000 in
the third.
The Grand Fleet looked on, bewildered but
impotent. Here was a situation to which none
of the old principles seemed to apply. The cover
provided by a superior battle fleet had never
been able to prevent isolated raiders inflicting
minor losses on trade ; but never before had
such an open and concerted attack on commerce
as was now going on taken place almost under
the nose of a greatly superior force of the most
14
SEA POWER IN THE LAST WAR
powerful battleships in the world. The British
battle fleet might be able to stretch a barrier
between merchant shipping and the German
surface forces which the latter were not able
to break down. It could not prevent the
submarines from dodging under the barrier.
What was even more embarrassing, the British
battleships could do nothing to protect merchant
vessels against the wholesale destruction that the
submarines were meting out. In all previous wars,
the appearance of line-of-battleships on the
scene had sufficed to send all smaller classes of
enemy ships scurrying for safety. The battleships
of the Grand Fleet were, however, painfully aware
that they were even more welcome targets to the
submarines than were tramp steamers ; and
that their arrival in the area where the sub-
marines were doing their deadliest work would
only bring themselves into danger without
providing any succour to the trade that was
being decimated.
It was not the large but the small ship that
defeated the submarine campaign ; the destroyer,
the sloop, the P boat, the Q boat, the trawler, the
drifter. And these small ships defeated it not only
by reason of their small size but just as much or
even more by virtue of their large numbers. The
small, fast and handy destroyers or P boats were
difficult targets for a submarine, but not impossible
15
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
ones. Had they been as relatively scarce and
irreplaceable as were the battleships, it would have
been worth the submarines' while to have picked
them off first, after which the merchant shipping,
having no defenders left, could have been
destroyed at leisure. It was because there were
hundreds and hundreds of anti-submarine small
craft available and because many more were
pouring out of the shipyards that it was hopeless
for the submarines to try to deal with them
first, and led the underwater craft to develop
their attack direct against the merchant ships.
Even then, it was not until the introduction of
convoy that the submarine campaign was mastered.
The records, of the old wars showed that the
system of convoy gave much greater protection
to shipping and was more economical of warship
tonnage than the unregulated cruising or patrolling
to which the Admiralty at first pinned its faith.
Patrolling was particularly ineffective against an
enemy vessel that could submerge. Numberless
were the instances where a patrolling destroyer
would go off in chase of a submarine reported
10 or 20 miles away, only to find a blank horizon
when the spot was reached. If merchant ships
were collected into a convoy, however, and the
convoy surrounded by anti-submarine escorts, it
became impossible for the submarine to make
its attack on shipping without the practical
i6
SEA POWER IN THE LAST WAR
certainty of itself making the close acquaintance
of the dreaded depth charge. As the old wars
had shown, the best way to deal with a raider
was to place the defending warships at the one
place where he had to go if he was to do any
damage ; namely, alongside the quarry. It
required, however, the near approach of disaster
before the Admiralty would take to heart this
lesson that history was shyly ready to bring to
its notice.
The naval war was won on two fronts. The
surface war was won by a battle fleet, consisting
of a mixed force of big and small ships ; battle-
ships, battle cruisers, cruisers, destroyers and fleet
submarines. The submarine war was won by
small craft alone.
17
CHAPTER II
THE LESSONS OF THE WAR
The lessons of the war were many. One of them,
the pre-eminence of the convoy system as a means
of protecting non-combatant shipping, has received
perhaps the greatest attention. This is probably
due to the high degree of publicity it received
during the war, when its introduction, forced on
a reluctant Admiralty by outside pressure, brought
relief to the nation when the severance of its
sea-borne supplies seemed inevitable.
The lesson of the naval war which appears,
however, to be the most far-reaching in its
implications is that of the great moral effect
exercised by the underwater weapons, the torpedo
and the mine. The moral influence that emanated
from these two weapons was primarily due to
their great destructive properties which were
directed against a ship's most vulnerable region.
It was powerfully reinforced by that fear of the
unseen that belonged naturally to an attack by
the submerged submarine or the darkened
destroyer at night. The mine was also a hidden
weapon, and wherever a combatant had reason
i8
THE LESSONS OF THE WAR
to believe that he was negotiating a mined
area, its influence too was considerable. It was,
however, to the unseen but also mobile submarine
that the greatest deference was paid.
The greater anxiety felt regarding the mobile
than regarding the fixed underwater danger, was
already visible in the Russo-Japanese war. The
Russian personnel stood up well enough to the
menace of the mine. When, however, on the
occasion of the sinking of the Russian flagship
through striking a mine, someone in the Russian
fleet raised the cry of submarines, there was
panic. For some minutes guns' crews lost all
control of themselves and fired wildly into the
water all round them.
The outbreak of the Great War showed that
the disturbing influence of mobile underwater
attack was not confined to one nationality. Within
a few weeks of the commencement of hostilities,
British men-of-war had on two occasions opened
fire inside their harbours on enemy submarines
that were not there. On one of these occasions,
the whole of the Grand Fleet had hurried out
of harbour and the Commander-in-Chief had led
it to the distant security of west Scottish waters
until anti-submarine defences of the main fleet
base could be improvised. As mentioned in the
last chapter, this retirement had the eflFect of
uncovering the eastern part of the English
19
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Channel, the approaches to the Thames and the
east coast of England to German attack.
The powerful moral effect attaching to under-
water attack was no less marked in later stages of
the war. Jutland provides a particularly instructive
example. During the course of the battle, British
ships reported the presence of nine submarines,
none of which in fact existed. These false reports,
though psychologically instructive, did not,
however, influence the course of the battle. It
is to the torpedo as carried by the destroyer that
we must turn for a greater effect.
The day was misty, and Jellicoe had deployed
his fleet into line of battle before he could
see the German battle line with his own eyes.
The rear half of the British line, however, just
came within sight of the leading German ships
and was able to bring them under fire. Scheer,
on his side, equally could not see the ships of the
Grand Fleet, but he could see their gunflashes
stabbing out through the mist up and down what
seemed an unpleasantly long battle line. He
realised that he was in the presence of the Grand
Fleet, and evidently concluded that it was time
he made off. He therefore swung his whole line
round and retired.
Jellicoe did not see him go. The Germans had
merely disappeared, and though the Commander-
in-Chief altered the course of the Grand Fleet
20
THE LESSONS OF THE WAR
several points inwards, no enemy was to be
seen for some time. Then suddenly he came
into view again. What had happened, though
Jellicoe did not know it, was that, after having
retired for 15 or 20 minutes, Scheer believed
he had shaken the Grand Fleet off, and that if he
altered course back to the eastward he would
pass well clear astern of it and be able to escape
back to Germany by the Skagerrack. Round,
therefore, came the High Seas Fleet to an easterly
course once more ; only for Scheer to find himself
in greater peril than ever. For his fleet of battle-
ships in line ahead was now heading straight
towards the middle of the Grand Fleet which
was stretched across its path in that particularly
favourable tactical position known as crossing the
enemy's T. The High Seas Fleet was steering
directly for destruction, which Scheer quickly
realised as the combined broadsides of a large
part of the British battle line crashed down on
his leading ships. There was only one thing
to do and not a moment to lose in doing it.
Scheer ordered another reversal of course in the
hope of being again able to break away to the
westward. The German " battle turn," a delicate
enough manoeuvre at any time, was this time
rendered trebly difficult by being done under
a heavy fire, especially for the German 3rd
(battle) Squadron, which was leading the line,
21
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
and therefore bearing the brunt of the British
cannonade. The manoeuvre of turning a battle-
ship through half a circle takes lo to 12 minutes,
and while they were turning the leading German
ships were in desperate danger. The unexpected
turn, being made under a concentrated fire, had
thrown them into some confusion. The ships were
badly bunched up, there was danger of collision,
and most of them had their fire masked by the
ship next to them, while salvos of heavy enemy
shells were rushing down on them from several
directions at once. To make matters worse, one
German battleship's port engine had broken down,
and another's torpedo nets had fallen off the
netshelf and were in danger of fouling the screws.
The opportunity thus presented to Jellicoe
was such as a commander could hardly hope to
improve upon. Damaged, in confusion, and
turning slowly round to retreat, the German
3rd Squadron at the very least, if not the rest
of the High Seas Fleet, were his for the asking
if he would turn in after them. Was he doing so ?
Unfortunately he was not. As the German line
swung gradually round under helm, the hostile
fire slackened and died away. The British had
sighted some German destroyers moving out to
attack, and Jellicoe had put into practice his long
decided policy of not exposing his fleet to under-
water damage if he could avoid it. He had turned
22
THE LESSONS OF THE WAR
away and was steaming in the opposite direction.
When he altered back again, the enemy was
nowhere to be seen. For the remaining hour
and a quarter of dayhght the Grand Fleet
steamed along in silence, wondering where the
enemy had gone and wondering in vain. At length,
just as dusk was settling down over the sea,
Beatty's battle-cruisers sighted and had a brief
engagement with some German battleships, who
soon turned away and disappeared in the gathering
gloom. For the battleships of the Grand Fleet,
however, the chance had been allowed to slip away
over an hour and a quarter earlier, never to return.
In view of these occurrences, can there be any
doubt as to which was the decisive weapon in the
battle ? Jellicoe had with him on the battle-
field a total of 27 battleships against the enemy's
22. Six of the enemy's battleships, however,
were pre-dreadnoughts, which could count as
only half the strength of the average British
dreadnought battleship. A true comparison
would therefore be 27 British to 19 German,
which gave the British a numerical superiority
of nearly 50 per cent. This British superiority
becomes even clearer if measured in terms of
guns on a broadside.
15" 14" i3'5' 12" 11' Total
British 40 10 no 76 236
German 112 43 155
23
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
This greatly superior British fleet had 2J hours
of dayhght from the time of first deployment in
which to eff'ect the destruction of its enemy ; an
amply sufficient period if close action had been
sought and maintained from the outset. There
was even long enough from the time of Scheer's
second appearance after his first retreat to the
westward, if Jellicoe had clung to the High Seas
Fleet from then Onwards. What undoubtedly
prevented that destruction and saved the High
Seas Fleet was the firing of 30 odd torpedoes
by those aforementioned destroyers at the critical
moment, leading as it did to the Grand Fleet
turning away.
This turn-away was a result of no momentary
decision. It had been decided on nearly two
years before. In October, 19 14, Admiral Jellicoe
had sent to the Admiralty a memorandum in which
he outlined his probable tactics in a fleet action.
In this memorandum he had expressed particular
concern regarding the possibility of a turn-
away by the German fleet. Any such retiring
movement, he said, he would regard as a trap.
*' If, for instance, the enemy battle fleet were
to turn away from an advancing fleet, I should
assume that the intention was to lead us over
mines and submarines, and I should decline to
he so drawn.^^
'* The situation is a difficult one. It is quite
24
THE LESSONS OF THE WAR
within the bounds of possibiUty that half our
battle fleet might be disabled by underwater
attack before the guns opened fire at all, if a false
move is made, and I feel that I must constantly
bear in mind the great probability of such attack
and be prepared tactically to prevent its success."
These extracts from Admiral Jellicoe's
memorandum are of the greatest significance, not
only for their tactical content but for their psycho-
logical. They afford a real glimpse into the
workings of his mind and they show, as clearly
as anything could, to how serious an extent it
was swayed by apprehension of the underwater
weapon. That this apprehension was the fruit
of instinctive dread rather than exhaustive exami-
nation and analysis admits of little doubt. Tactical
investigations carried out since the war have shown
that the successful use of mines in the rush and
uncertainty of a fleet action, the venue of which
cannot be known beforehand, is so unlikely as
to be hardly worth consideration ; and very much
the same could be said of the submarines then
possessed by either side. Admiral Jellicoe's
fears, anyway as regarded the submarine and
the mine, were groundless. It is true that it was
from the torpedoes fired by destroyers that he
turned away at Jutland, but his action in doing
so was obviously in tune with the attitude of mind
revealed by his memorandum of not taking any
c 25
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
chances with underwater attack, whatever its
form. In the event, his avoiding movement was
as ineffectual against the destroyers as it would
have been unnecessary against hypothetical mines
and submarines. For, in spite of the turn-away,
tjie torpedoes passed through the British line.
Jellicoe would therefore have been just as safe
if he had turned towards the enemy as away
from him, and the manoeuvre which broke off
the action and led to the escape of the High
Seas Fleet need never have been made.
The importance of the moral effect produced
by the underwater weapon was again exemplified,
and this time even more strongly, in the German
Fleet's sortie of August i8th, 1916. Admiral
Jellicoe had received warning that the High
Seas Fleet was probably coming out and had
sailed with the Grand Fleet to meet it. He had
also been warned that a number of submarines
were believed to be in the North Sea.
In the early morning of August 19th, the
Grand Fleet was steaming south not far from
the coast of England. The Commander-in-Chief
had information which pointed clearly to the High
Seas Fleet being at sea and somewhere to the
south-eastward of him. He also knew that the
Nottingham, one of the advanced cruisers 20
to 30 miles ahead of him had been either torpedoed
or mined, and the report of an enemy submarine
26
THE LESSONS OF THE WAR
had just reached him. On the strength of these
comparatively meagre indications of possible sub-
marine danger ahead, he turned his fleet round
and steamed away to the northward for about
two hours. When we remember that the High
Seas Fleet was out, that its destruction was
the cornerstone of our naval strategy, and
that after the disappointing outcome of the
Battle of Jutland only two months before, Jellicoe
must have been particularly keen to get another
chance at the enemy, we get some idea of the
powerful deterrent effect that the underwater
menace must have had on his mind to induce
him to turn north at such a time. When he resumed
a southward course again shortly after 9 a.m.,
his chance of meeting the High Seas Fleet had
gone. Whether he would have met it if he had
never abandoned his southerly course can never,
of course, be known. His two hours retreat to
the northward made it certain, however, that he
would not.
This episode illustrates once again and with
particular clarity the vastly greater influence
that could be exerted by the underv\^ater weapon
than by the gun. The Grand Fleet was in great
superiority, its battleships being 28 to the German
17 (the old 2nd Squadron having been left behind).
If action with the High Seas Fleet could have
been brought on, the battle, if estimated by
27
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
gunnery standards, could hardly have failed to
result in the complete victory of the British.
Nevertheless, we find that the greatly superior
British fleet which, with all its cruisers and
attendant destroyers, numbered about 150 ships
mounting nearly 1,000 guns, was checked in its
^utherly course and sent steaming back on its
tracks for two precious hours by the report of
one enemy submarine carrying perhaps half a
dozen torpedoes. Such is the power of the
invisible danger.
That the mine could exert a similar influence
to the torpedo was illustrated in the cruiser action
of November 17th, 1917. A German cruiser
force was surprised in the North Sea by a superior
force of British cruisers and made for home,
pursued by the British. That particular part of
the North Sea was known to be mined and the
admiral in command of the British advanced forces
had provisionally selected a line beyond which
he would not advance. As he approached this
line, the forces with him were in full action with
the inferior enemy and if the pursuit were pro-
longed there was good reason to hope for definite
results. When the Germans reached the line
they continued straight on. When the British
reached it, the most important units turned off,
despite the reasonable presumption that where
the enemy was content to go it was probably
28
THE LESSONS OF THE WAR
safe to follow. As a result, the enemy escaped.
These three episodes are particular instances
where the underwater weapon played the decisive
part. Its influence was not, however, confined
to isolated occasions but overspread the whole
naval strategy that we employed during the war.
As early as October, 19 14, Jellicoe had become
so infected by the submarine and mine danger
as mentally to have abandoned the southern
part of the North Sea on that account. Writing
to the Admiralty in that month, he said that " the
Germans cannot rely with certainty upon having
their full complement of submarines and mine-
layers present in a fleet action, unless the battle
is fought in waters selected by them, and in the
southern area of the North Sea. . . . My object
will therefore be to fight in the northern portion
of the North Sea. ..."
By the end of August, 1916, he had become
more explicit and more cautious. '* Hitherto,
it had been understood that we ought not to
seek action inside the area bounded by the
latitude of Horn Reefs and the 5th Meridian.
Admiral Jellicoe now proposed an extension of
the zone, and stated that, in his opinion, the
fleet ought not to operate in the arezi to the south
of Lat. 55° 30' N., and the east of Long. 4° E.,
except under exceptional circumstances."^ His
^ Naval Operations, Vol. IV, p. 48.
29
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
successor, Admiral Beatty, appears to have taken
the same attitude.
The war did not in fact confirm the claim of
Lord Fisher and the school of gunnery officers
who with him had virtually ruled the Navy from
the beginning of the century to the outbreak of
war that the gun was the decisive weapon of the
fleet. Admiral Jellicoe was one of this school and
he showed how much the decisive weapon theory
had taken hold of his mind. As Commander-in-
Chief of the Grand Fleet, he viewed the problem
before him through gunnery spectacles. He
did not ponder deeply how he was to sink the
enemy. He decided from the start that he would
sink him by the guns of his battleships. "It is
undoubtedly to our advantage," he said, " to
sink the enemy by gunfire." Such a remark
reveals the partiality of his view. Provided the
enemy were sunk by some means or other, it
could not matter what those means were. Jellicoe
had two main weapons, the heavy guns of his
capital ships and the torpedoes of his destroyers.
Whether it was the guns or the torpedoes that
delivered the coup de grace was immaterial so
long as the cmp was given. Jellicoe, however,
could only think in terms of turret guns. He
relegated the destroyers, with their 250 torpedoes,
to the subsidiary role of preventing the enemy's
destroyers from interfering with the main gun
30
THE LESSONS OF THE WAR
duel. As a result, two quite exceptional and
altogether golden opportunities of attacking the
enemy with torpedoes were missed ; for Scheer's
two advances in line ahead towards the British
line provided the Grand Fleet flotillas with the
sort of chances of which every destroyer officer
dreams. Those 250 torpedoes, however, remained
in their tubes.
Indeed, the claim on behalf of the gun to be the
decisive weapon of the fleet contained the seeds
of its own refutation. For if actions were to be
dominated by the gun, the bigger it was the
better. But the bigger the gun and the heavier
the armament carried, the bigger the ship that
was needed to carry it. The larger the ship,
however, the fewer of them the country could
aff"ord ; and the shrinkage in numbers consequent
on increasing size inevitably moved the balance
back in favour of the undei water weapon. For
the fewer his ships and the greater the reliance
he placed on the gun battle as the decisive act,
the less inclination would be felt by an admiral,
especially a gunnery admiral, as was Jellicoe, to
run any avoidable risk from those hateful under-
water weapons, with their unfair and malignant
power to stab him in the back and so to prejudice
his prospects in the all-important gunnery duel.
It was the great size and small number of the
big ships that gave the underwater weapons their
31
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
moral influence. One must not of course under-
estimate the intrinsic moral effect that belongs
to the danger that cannot be seen ; to the invisible
mine, to the lurking but unseen submarine, and
to the darkened destroyer that might loom
suddenly out of the blackness of the night to
discharge its dreaded torpedoes. That unseen
dangers of this kind make their mark on all men's
minds is undeniable. Yet the behaviour of the
smaller ships during the war goes to show that
it was not these natural human weaknesses
that played the dominant part in determining the
shrinking attitude of the big ship commanders
towards the underwater perils.
The smaller classes of ship went about their
business undeterred by possible dangers below
the surface. While the capital ships drew an
ever-narrowing circle round themselves to denote
the area in which it was safe for them to operate,
the small ships moved freely in all parts of the
North Sea. They ventured into mined areas.
They hunted submarines. They met the destroyer
at night on equal terms. They went very largely
where they pleased.
Their comparative indifference to the under-
water dangers was partly due to their small size.
Small and handy ships made poor targets for
the torpedo as fired either by submarine or
destroyer. But it was not that so much as their
32
THE LESSONS OF THE WAR
large numbers that gave them their freedom of
action. Over a hundred of these small ships
were lost during the v^^ar, by mines, by torpedo,
by gunfire, by collision, by shipwreck. The
authorities did not care very much, since there
were many more. Because they were numerous
they were allowed to take risks. In the problem
of size or gunpower versus numbers, the war
points in more ways than one to the value of
numbers.
A further example may be given in the case of
Admiral Jellicoe's complaints regarding his lack
of destroyers with the Grand Fleet. Jellicoe was
always bewailing his shortage of destroyers.
Writing in his book, The Grand Fleet, of the
destroyer situation in August, 19 14, he says that
the Germans had 96 destroyers against our 76,
regarding which comparison he talks of the
** superfluity " of destroyers that the Germans
possessed compared with us. Our own boats were,
however, very much the more powerful gun
vessels, their armaments consisting mostly of
three 4" guns, while none mounted less than two
4" and two 12-pounders. By contrast, some of
the German boats had an armament of two
24-pounders (3* 5"), but the majority had no more
than three 4-pounders. As gun vessels ours
were vastly superior. Yet although Jellicoe had
charged our own destroyers with the primary
•t
O
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
task in a fleet action of engaging the German
destroyers by gunfire and frustrating their attack
on the battleships, he appeared to take no comfort
from the great superiority of the British boats'
gun armament or to consider that it made up for
their inferiority of numbers. To the Admiral
it was numbers that seemed to count.
To summarise therefore, we may say that the
chief lessons of the war were : —
1. That convoy was greatly superior to
cruising and patrolling as a means of
protecting trade.
2. The very powerful influence exerted by
the underwater weapons over the actions
of the big ships, but not the small ones.
3 . The decreasing range of utility of the great
ships.
34
CHAPTER III
GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
The victory of the AUies, coupled with the
surrender of the German and Austrian fleets,
left the British Navy in a position of supremacy
unique in its history. The German Navy had been
practically destroyed. Austria as a naval power
had ceased to exist. The French and Italian navies
hardly counted. The only ones that mattered
were the Japanese and the American, and we
were allied to the Japanese. Even alone our
position was secure enough, as this following
comparison shows :
Capital
ships
Cruisers
Destroyers
Britain. .
49
88
380
America
35
i8
100
Japan . .
i8
21
85
35
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
The position was however less fortunate than
it seemed. Britain might possess a vast war
fleet, but she had neither the resources nor the
will to keep it up. The four years' struggle, though
it had ended victoriously, had left her very nearly
bankrupt and had given rise to an intense aversion
to war and a passionate desire to beat the sword
into a motor-car body as quickly as possible.
As had often happened before, the breaking up
of the fleet that had brought us victory was put
in hand.
Our position, moreover, was threatened by
competition from without as well as weariness
within. The war had brought untold wealth to
the United States. The customary exercise of
Britain's maritime belligerent rights had also
caused widespread resentment among United
States citizens, who were deeply indignant at
what they regarded as our unwarrantable inter-
ference with their neutral rights to trade with
whom they pleased over seas which should
be free to all. That they had to put up with this
interference on our part, the American people
correctly ascribed to their lack of a large enough
fleet ; and as the wealth of Europe began to flow
westward in an expanding stream, they were
presented with the means of rectifying the
omission. A very large building programme was
put in hand, designed to safeguard Americans
36
GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
from any recurrence of what they conceived to
be the unbearable indignities to which the
British blockade of Germany had subjected them.
Across the Pacific, Japan was also making hay
while the sun shone. The war had brought her,
too, unexpected wealth. This and the pre-
occupation of the western nations with their
mutual destruction in Europe, gave the Japanese
a chance to forge ahead with their policy of ensur-
ing for themselves the hegemony of the far East.
They also embarked on a building programme,
an action which immediately brought suspicious
glances from the American side of the Pacific
Ocean. No sooner therefore were the exhausted
and impoverished British free from the German
trouble than they found themselves faced by a
new naval competition led by the United States
and Japan.
This competition was saved from becoming a
deadly race by the initiative of the United States
in proposing the Washington Conference. In
the ensuing Washington naval treaty, we gave up
our centuries-old policy of a predominant navy
and agreed to parity with the United States.
This parity applied, however, only to capital
ships and aircraft carriers. It was agreed that the
capital ship and carrier tonnage of Britain, the
United States and Japan should be proportioned
in the ratio of 5 : 5 : 3, none of the capital ships
37
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
being allowed to exceed 35,000 tons or carry
guns larger than 16". France and Italy agreed
to an equal but lower ratio of rd'] each.
An attempt was also made on our initiative
to abolish the submarine as being a weapon of
aggression alone. Some other nations, notably
France and Japan, did not take this view of
its character and the proposal was defeated. It
was, however, agreed that it should never again
be used in the attack on commerce unless the
passengers and crew of ships attacked were first
put into a place of safety, from which category
the ship's boats were expressly excluded. Chiefly
owing to the defeat of our proposal to abolish the
submarine, quantitative limitation was not
extended to cruisers and smaller vessels. Cruisers
were however limited to 10,000 tons and 8"
guns.
As an inducement to Japan to accept the position
of inferiority that the 5:5:3 ratio laid upon
her and which had hurt her amour propre con-
siderably, it was agreed that no further develop-
ment should take place to naval bases in the
Pacific such as Honolulu, Guam or Hong Kong,
which might be regarded as being intended
for use against the Japanese Islands. By this
agreement, Japan received a measure of assurance
that neither the United States nor Britain had
aggressive designs against her, since they were
38
GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
thus relinquishing the means for sending their
fleets near enough to Japan to be a serious
threat.
The new British base that had been started
at Singapore in 1921 was excluded from this
provision. It was claimed by us that the Singapore
Base, while necessary for the defence of the
British Empire, could not possibly be regarded
as menacing Japan ; which was true enough
since it lay 2,500 miles from the Japanese main
islands. The base was indeed an obviously
defensive measure. Nevertheless, it was equally
obviously against the possibility of Japanese
aggression that it was being constructed ; which
formed a somewhat significant commentary on
the degree of dependence that we were placing
on the security to be derived from the Anglo-
Japanese Alliance.
That Alliance was not, however, to outlast
the Conference. For various reasons, among
which the desire to please the United States
undoubtedly played a prominent part, we decided
to terminate the Alliance. In doing so, we were
setting the seal on a change in the fundamental
problems of our naval strategy that was of the
utmost importance.
In every war we had waged before 19 14, our
chief enemy had been a European one ; the
French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Russians.
39
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
In all these wars, the question of the defence of
our outlying possessions was complementary to
the defence of our territory and interests in home
waters. By blockading the enemy fleets in their
own ports, we protected not only the British Isles
but every British possession no matter how far
distant against attack by those fleets. Strength
at the centre covered the whole Imperial perimeter.
If, on the other hand, an enemy detachment were
to escape the blockade and sail off" to attack
British interests in the West Indies or the South
Seas, a British squadron of appropriate size
could be sent after it without materially affecting
the balance of strength in home waters. In those
old wars, British squadrons could and did fight
all over the world, but such operations were
always intimately bound up with the main
contest in European waters. If the main enemy
strength were in European waters, so had ours
to be. Should the enemy send an important part
of his fleet to distant seas, as did the French
to the West Indies in the War of American
Independence, we could follow suit without in
any way lessening the security of the British
Isles. Operations in home waters and in outlying
parts of the world were and always had been
interdependent.
All this was changed by the rise of the United
States and Japan as great naval powers at the
40
GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
latter end of the nineteenth century. We were then
faced, for the first time in our history, with
powerful foreign fleets far distant from the old
battlegrounds of Europe. No longer therefore
was the naval situation in European waters for
us the determining factor in our strategy. We
were now presented with the possibility of major
attack both at home and in one or even two far
distant areas at the same time. The likelihood of
becoming embroiled with the United States is
one that we have, with instinctive wisdom,
refused to countenance. As regards Japan, the
conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in
1902 served for many years to prevent all the
implications of the new alignment from becoming
fully recognised, especially during the Great
War, when it permitted us to pursue our time-
honoured strategy of keeping our eyes fixed on
the European enemy. That the virtual disappear-
ance of any serious European rival brought about
by the war led to an awakening on our part to the
significance of the new situation in the Far East
is indicated by the commencement of the Singapore
Base even before the Anglo-Japanese Alliance
was abandoned. The termination of the Alliance
brought that new situation into the front rank of
our strategical liabilities. In the future, we must
take account of the possibility of having to conduct
a major naval war in two hemispheres at once, a
D 41
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
thing we have never done before, and of this
possibihty the estabhshment of the Berhn-Rome-
Tokyo triangle gives a clear warning.
The success of the Washington Conference
caused naval limitation to become a factor in the
internal politics of more than one country. The
ten years that followed the Conference saw the
flood-tide of reaction against war and the springing
up, especially in America and England, of peace
societies, women's anti-war movements, pacifist
groups, League of Nations enthusiasts and similar
bodies, controlling important numbers of votes.
To placate these peace groups became the serious
concern of democratic governments. In America,
the peace movement had a specially naval bias,
arising from the fact that the Washington Treaty
had been brought about by American initiative,
and was therefore regarded with particular pride
as an essentially American product. It was not
long therefore before the further extension of
naval limitation began to be actively canvassed
among American political groups and thereby to
engage the earnest attention of the administration.
The ratio principle, said Americans, having been
successfully applied to capital ships and aircraft
carriers, what should prevent it being extended
to cruisers and smaller vessels } In the British
view there was a good deal to prevent it. While
battleships and battle cruisers were vessels of
42
GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
combat only, whose number and size could there-
fore be calculated with exclusive reference to
rival capital ships, the same did not hold good
for other classes of ship. Absolutely dependent
on overseas supplies in a way that the practically
self-contained United States were not, Britain
had good reason to know that her requirements
in cruisers and smaller surface vessels were
determined not only by what other nations had
got but also by the volume of trade that required
warship protection. For vessels of these trade-
protection classes, requirements had to be assessed
on an absolute as well as a relative basis. Britain
consequently claimed that by virtue of having the
largest volume of trade in the world that needed
protection, she had a right to a larger number of
cruisers and other trade protection vessels to
look after it. This number she placed at 70,
a figure which she declared to be necessary to
her whatever other powers might have.
On the other hand, the British saw a promising
avenue towards economy in the reduction in the
sizes of certain classes of ship. If battleships,
she said, were drastically reduced in size by all the
principal naval powers, no one would be relatively
worse off and everyone would gain by a great
saving on construction costs. Similarly, she
thought that the 10,000 ton cruiser, at which
maximum tonnage cruiser size had been stabilised
43
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
at Washington, could well be cut down to 7,000
tons without disadvantage to anyone.
In 1927 these rival theories were brought
together at the Geneva Conference. The
Americans pressed for a numerical reduction of
cjuisers and smaller vessels and the establishment
of parity with England in those classes, a con-
tention that Britain was unable to accept. On the
other hand, the natural American instinct for the
" bigger and better " led the United States to
oppose the British proposal for reduction in
size. The Conference ended in a deadlock.
The Washington Treaty had contained a clause
allowing for a further naval conference in 1930
to consider the action to renew or modify the
original Treaty, which latter was for an initial
period of ten years only. By 1930 naval limitation
had become a primary factor in British internal
politics as well as American. The Labour Party
was in power, and it was determined to make a
striking gesture towards disarmament at the
1930 Naval Conference, even if this meant over-
riding its own naval advisers. In pursuance of
this resolve, it agreed at the London Naval
Conference to the American proposal for further
limitation of the smaller surface ships that included
a reduction to 50 of the 70 cruisers that the
British Government had declared to be necessary
in 1927. In addition, the capital ship replacement
44
GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
that would otherwise have commenced in 1931
would be put off till 1936. The qualitative Hmi-
tations set at Washington were therefore continued
for a further period. The following table shows
the numerical strength of the British Navy after
the London Treaty reductions had taken effect
compared with its strength in 19 14, and at the end
of the war. The 19 14 figures include only ships
less than twenty years old.
Battleships
and
battle
Cruisers
Destroyers,
sloops, etc.
Submarines
cruisers
I9I4 ..
69
108
285
74
I9I9 ..
49
88
450
98
1933 • •
15
47
143
56
In 1932 the great Disarmament Conference
met at Geneva and proved a complete failure.
The next year saw the genesis of the present stage
of international politics in the rise of the Nazi
regime in Germany. From then onwards, the drift
of affairs towards pre-war conditions has been
unchecked. Early in 1935 Germany began to
repudiate the naval and military limitations that
the Versailles Treaty had imposed upon her, but
in June, 1935, she made an agreement with us,
45
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
in which she undertook to accept for herself a
surface navy about one third the size of ours,
though she demanded a higher proportion of
submarines.
The most violent disturbance of the post-war
conditions was brought about by the crisis over
the Abyssinian affair. The near approach of war
against Italy brought the British Government
up with a jolt against the hard fact that the
defences of this country had been allowed to
decline a long way below the danger mark.
International gestures had evoked no response
and had merely reduced this country, as the
chief gesturer, to a state of weakness that invited
attack. The sudden realisation of our undefended
condition, as the cold blast from the Abyssinian
highlands swept away the Genevan mists that
had lain for so long over the British Isles, came
as an unpleasant shock to the country and caused
a strong reaction. The nation hurriedly set in
motion a huge rearmament programme to cost
;£i, 500, 000,000 — undoubtedly the largest in its
history. It is easy enough to drop behind, however,
but not so easy to regain the lead. No sooner did
we embark on this great programme for the
recovery of our security than all our rivals did
the same thing.
Meanwhile, in December, 1934, Japan had
given the required two years' notice of her
46
GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
intention to terminate the Washington Agreement.
This intimation necessitated the caUing of a
conference in the following year, which would
in any case have been required under the terms
of the 1930 Treaty. The conference met in
December, 1935, and endeavour was made to
secure general agreement. The Japanese, however,
remained obdurate in making demands which the
other powers felt they could not accept, and
eventually the representatives of Japan left the
conference. It continued without them, and in
1936 an agreement was reached between the
United States, France and Britain, the most
important effects of which were to limit the capital
ship to 35,000 tons and 14" guns, cruisers to
8,000 tons and 6" guns, and aircraft carriers to
23,000 tons, while numerical or quantitative
limitation was abandoned.
Hardly was the ink dry upon the signatures
than rumours began to reach the other naval
powers that Japan was building or intending
to build battleships of over 40,000 tons, armed
with guns of over 14" calibre. The three signatories
of the 1936 Treaty thereupon addressed a query
to her, asking if these rumours were true. Their
truth Japan, in reply, would neither confirm nor
deny ; whereupon the other three Powers
informed her that failing specific denial they would
assume the rumours to be true, and would in that
47
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
case reserve their liberty of action to take whatever
counteraction they considered necessary. They
have consequently decided to raise the maximum
tonnage level up to 45,000, though Britain has
announced that she does not intend for the present
to go beyond 40,000 tons. With the coming into
operation of these clauses, it may be said that
effective limitation of naval armaments will have
disappeared.
There would still remain, however, one generally
accepted instrument affecting naval warfare on
the international Statute Book. The abolition of
what is usually known as *' unrestricted " sub-
marine warfare against commerce was agreed to
at Washington by Britain, the United States,
Japan, France and Italy. In 1936 it was also
accepted by Germany and Russia. Almost immedi-
ately the Spanish war broke out. In that war,
the exploits of the so-called pirate submarines,
which nobody believes to have been Spanish,
have dropped an eloquent hint to the world of
how much reliance it, the modern civilised world,
may expect to place on those international under-
takings which are commonly described as solemn.
Treaties of naval limitation seemed valuable
safeguards only so long as the world had no serious
need of them. With the first touch of real danger,
the nations have thrown them hurriedly aside.
As a consequence, the nation that made the
48
GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
greatest sacrifices in order to keep them in being
found itself in an unpleasantly weak position
when they crumbled into dust. Successive
British Governments reduced the Navy consider-
ably below the strength that responsible naval
opinion regarded as necessary for the safety of
the country and the Empire. After 1935 the
country began, almost feverishly, to make good
the deficit that had been allowed to grow up in
its naval defences. It was not so easy. In 1936
a naval programme was announced for the
construction of :
2 capital ships
2 aircraft carriers
7 cruisers
20 destroyers and sloops
8 submarines
and other smaller vessels.
This was followed in 1937 and 1938 by further
programmes totalling :
5 capital ships
3 aircraft carriers
14 cruisers
19 destroyers and sloops
10 submarines.
Other countries, however, were also putting guns
before butter. Germany was building large
battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines.
49
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
So were Italy, France, the United States and
(it is believed) Japan, the latter's battleships being
possibly of a larger size than ever. Germany and
Italy, and especially Italy, were turning out
submarines at a phenomenal rate. Imposing as
was our naval rearmament programme, was
it restoring to us that margin of safety that we
had voluntarily relinquished in our quest for
collective security ? We can probably take
Germany, Italy and Japan as our most likely
antagonists. A comparison of the naval situation
before rearmament and when existing programmes
have been completed should show to what extent
we are making headway.
The table opposite shows fairly clearly that, in
relation to the groups that we can presumably
regard as antagonistic, we shall at the best be
no better off after the completion of our new
construction than we were before. Other nations
are building in proportion as fast or faster than
we are.
SO
GENERAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
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51
CHAPTER IV
t
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
While the political and strategical developments
described in the last chapter were taking place,
technical matters were not standing still. Indeed,
the great advances in aeronautical technique
alone that have been made since the war have
introduced into naval strategy a number of
problems of the highest significance. So novel
are these problems and so important may be
their bearing on future naval warfare that it is
thought preferable to discuss them separately,
and they are set out in the next chapter.
Technical developments in other directions
have followed the historical path of a contest
between the means of oiBFence and defence. In
the nineteenth century this contest expressed
itself in the well-known competition between
guns and armour. The post-war naval treaties
caused a suspension of this particular contest
by slowing up battleship construction and setting
an agreed limit to the size of the gun. The rivalry
between the offensive and the defensive continued,
52
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
however, in other directions, notably in con-
nection with the underwater weapons.
The great influence wielded by the torpedo
and the mine in the Great War has been described
in Chapter II. Up to 19 14 it had occurred to
no one to devise defensive measures directed
towards minimising the effects of the weapons
themselves. Attention had been given only to
counter-attack and avoidance. If possible, the
ships that carried the torpedoes or mines should
be sunk before their weapons could be fired or
laid. If not, contact with the weapons should be
avoided by sweeping or by steering to miss them.
The great havoc caused by the torpedo during
the war brought forth the idea of structural
defence. By fitting " bulges " outside the under-
water part of the ship's side, torpedoes might
be made to explode at such a distance from
the side proper as to preserve it intact against
the explosion. Only a few ships were fitted with
these bulges during the war owing to the difficulty
of sparing vessels for long enough periods during
actual hostilities. After the war, however, all
existing capital ships were taken in hand and had
bulges fitted. With the new battleships Nelson
and Rodfiey of the post-war programme, a further
development was made by putting the bulges inside
the ship rather than outside, thus maintaining the
normal underwater streamline shape of the ship.
53
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
This bulging of the big ships has been claimed
to have given them a high degree of immunity
from torpedo fire, the effect of which is now
spoken of as less to be feared than that of heavy
shell. It is doubtful, however, whether this
optimism is justifiable. Bulge protection, being
mostly a post-armistice development, is still very
largely an unknown factor under war conditions.
It is true that experiments have been carried out,
but they were necessarily wanting in certain battle
ingredients whose absence must leave the value
of the experiments to some extent in doubt. The
armour penetration tests conducted before the
war on the proof range against a fixed plate gave
our naval artillerists a very erroneous conception
of what would happen under action conditions
with the plate itself moving rapidly in a different
plane to the shell. Similarly, a torpedo test against
a rapidly-moving bulged vessel — which so far as I
am aware has not been made — may quite easily give
results that are quite different from those against
a ship at rest. There were cases in the early days
of bulges or a section of bulge coming away in
bad weather, and on at least one such occasion
the captain reported that there was danger of
other sections coming away as well and taking the
ship's side plating with them, a risk that com-
pelled him to reduce to a very low speed. Though
it is possible that a strengthening of the bulge
54
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
structure may have eliminated this danger, it
remains the fact that v^^e do not yet know for
certain what reduction of speed a torpedo explosion
on the bulge would necessitate.
Ships with internal bulges will be more or less
free from the above limitation. Yet, however
efficient bulges, whether internal or external,
may prove to be, the average effects of a torpedo
or mine explosion cannot fail to be more serious
than those of the shell. For a shell may explode
on armour, and do no damage at all ; while if
it enters the ship, there are many places where it
could burst without causing any appreciable
reduction of the ship's fighting value. A mine
or torpedo explosion, on the other hand, will
always mean a couple of months in dock. A ship
torpedoed on the bulge may live to fight another
day ; but it may not be the day you want.
Even if the bulges are all that is claimed
for them, it is necessary to remember that they
do not cover the whole of the ship's side. There
still remains an unprotected section at each end
of the ship. They do not in particular cover
that very vulnerable sternmost section of the
ship that contains those vital objects the propellers,
the propeller shafts and the rudder, the damaging
of which would be very serious indeed. There
is also the possibility, which although unlikely
ought not to be ignored, of a torpedo entering
55
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
the hole blown in the bulge by a previous one and
exploding against the ship's side proper.
Moreover, the admitted strengthening of the
defence that the bulge, whether outer or inner,
brought with it had its natural reaction in
endjeavours to increase the power of the offensive.
Though the side might be shielded, there remained
the ship's bottom which it was almost impossible
to protect against a heavy underwater explosion.
Something can be done by increasing the height
of the double bottoms, but it is generally believed
that a heavy explosion under the bottom could
hardly fail to burst in the inner hull, and very
possibly displace the engines or boilers in doing so.
What, then, was needed was to devise means for
causing a torpedo to explode under a ship's
bottom. To adjust the depth so as to make it
run under the ship was easy. To make it go
off as it passed underneath called obviously for
some non-contact apparatus to be brought into
operation by the near presence of the ship. It
is known that foreign navies have been making
experiments with this end in view, though
whether any of them have succeeded in perfecting
any method of doing so is not certain. If a non-
contact explosion has been evolved — and if so,
it is not likely to be confined to one navy only —
the torpedo will have recovered its wartime
power of causing very severe damage and possible
56
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
destruction with one hit. In that case, all the
moral power that belonged to it as being, with
the mine, far the most devastating weapon of
naval warfare is likely to return to it. It does
not even seem necessary for the non-contact
gear actually to have been perfected for this to
happen. Being, as the non-contact torpedo is,
a possibility that has to be reckoned with, a
naval commander will not know for certain whether
his adversary possesses it or not. If the last
war is any guide, he is likely to assume the worst
and to frame his strategy accordingly. In dealing
with the underwater weapon, the threat may be
as powerful as the actuality. To declare an area
mined in the last war was often as effective in
keeping ships out of it as actually to mine it.
The same general arguments apply to the mine
as to the torpedo. The development of a non-
contact mine would permit it to be laid at a depth
below the normal ship's draught, which again
would enable it to circumvent the paravane and
explode under the bottom. Unless therefore some
counter to the non-contact exploder is previously
devised, it seems likely that in the next war both
the mine and the torpedo will be regarded with
the same dread and treated with the same respect
that they were in the last.
If the torpedo has been liable to vary in impor-
tance according to the ebb and flow of its
^ 57
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
destructive power relative to the defensive equip-
ment of the ship attacked, the same appHes to
the vessels that carried the torpedo. Particularly
is this so in regard to the submarine. The outbreak
of the war had found the surface ship practically
defenceless against the submarine, provided the
latter could approach near enough to get in its
attack. A means of counter-attack was produced
during the war in the depth charge. This was an
effective anti-submarine weapon provided it could
be dropped near enough to its target. The difficulty
was that there was no means of knowing where
a submarine was when it was under water. Up
to the end of the war this problem was never
solved, and the first indication of a hostile sub-
marine was usually the firing of torpedoes. When
the enemy had thus disclosed himself, the dropping
of depth charges was still more or less a blind
affair, and it was chiefly luck if the submarine
was damaged.
Very shortly after the war, science managed
to produce a means for determining the position
of submerged objects, the lack of which had
hitherto handicapped surface ships so severely
in dealing with the submarine. An instrument was
produced, working on the echo principle, which
enabled the approximate range and bearing of a
submerged object to be ascertained. With this
apparatus it became possible to locate and attack
58
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
an unseen submarine with a far greater chance
of success than had previously been possible.
The invention of the echo detection gear
caused a slump in the shares of the submarine,
just as the development of bulge protection had
lowered the estimated value of the torpedo.
In the case of the submarine, it is likely that the
reaction was all the stronger by reason of the
fear and alarm which the underwater vessel had
inspired during the war, when it had so very
nearly brought Great Britain to her knees. The
new appliance was warmly greeted as providing
the necessary antidote to submarine warfare
which would, it was confidently assumed, be
reduced in future to a shadow of its former self.
This comfortable assurance of the decline of the
submarine as a potential danger is well illustrated
in a recent speech of Sir Samuel Hoare's in the
House of Commons, when he said that :
*' to-day we are justified in saying that, although
we regard the submarine as an extravagant
nuisance that ought to be abolished, the
submarine is no longer a danger to the security
of the British Empire."^
In uttering this inspiriting judgment. Sir Samuel
was giving a lead to the optimists which they were
not slow to follow. Many of them seized on his
^Hansard, November 15th, 1937.
59
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
words as evidence that the submarine could in
future be largely discounted as a war factor.
To take an example, the anonymous writer of a
Times article on oil in wartime last December
quoted Sir Samuel's statement in order to argue,
in opposition to the opinion of Admiral Sir
Howard Kelly, that the tankers bringing oil
to this country in wartime would be in no real
danger from submarine attack. Since from this
and other references to it, Sir Samuel's confident
statement seems to have been widely noticed
and to have had no little influence in shaping
lay opinion in the country, it is desirable to examine
whether the available evidence bears him out.
The presumption is that Sir Samuel's statement
was based on the result of the peace practices
that the fleet is constantly carrying out. Now,
as every service man knows, peace practices can
never be quite representative of actual warfare,
being always conducted under partially artificial
conditions and usually under specially favourable
ones. Considerations of a rationed fuel allowance
and of an always over-stocked training programme
demand that the most be made of the time allocated
to any form of training. Such things as anti-
submarine exercises are therefore inevitably carried
out in areas where submarines have previously
been stationed and usually take place in moderately
good weather and last a comparatively short time.
60
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE WAR
In wartime with long periods of strain, uncer-
tainty, fatigue, and with every kind of weather
to contend with, good, bad and very bad, the
results obtained are likely to be a good deal
poorer than peace exercises would promise.
Such at all events was the lesson of the last war
in regard to gunnery and torpedo results. It
is noteworthy that this estimate has not been
contradicted by the experience of the inter-
national patrol against the activities of the
" pirate " submarines in the Mediterranean. The
evidence provided under these semi-active service
conditions has not been particularly encouraging.
On October 4th, 1937, the British destroyer
Basilisk thought she detected a submarine through
her echo gear and proceeded to drop depth charges
on its supposed position. Later on, after an
inquiry, the Admiralty informed the world that
it was satisfied that no submarine had been present.
This episode suggests that the detecting appara-
tus is by no means faultless and that what occurred
here where no great issue, such as the protection
of a fleet of battleships or of a convoy, was at
stake and where the nerves of officers and men
cannot have been under any serious strain, may
happen again and more frequently under the
greater hazards of actual hostilities. Had Sir
Samuel's pronouncement been made before this
episode, its optimism could be better understood.
61
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
But since it was uttered a short time afterwards,
its confident tone seems less easy to justify.
Actually, I have yet to meet the naval officer
who is ready to endorse Sir Samuel's cheerful
estimate or who does not view it as mistakenly
ove^-sanguine, especially in view of the shortage
of small craft to be referred to in Chapter VII.
62
CHAPTER V
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AIR WEAPON
It will be useful at the beginning of this chapter
to state what the aircraft is. The aircraft that
flies over the sea to take part in warlike operations
against or connected with ships is to all intents
a ship itself. With its ability to fly above the
surface of the sea, it is blood-brother to the
submarine with its ability to move below it. We
may therefore regard warships as divisible into
three distinct species : surface vessels, which
operate on the surface ; submarine vessels, which
operate below the surface ; and supermarine
vessels or aircraft, which operate above it. The
supermarine vessels may be either ship-borne
aircraft, carried by and operating from a ship ;
or they may be shore-based aircraft operating
from a land aerodrome. Both are capable of
performing the same general functions and are
therefore operationally indistinguishable. For
that reason, it is imperatively necessary that the
Navy should be given full control over those of
its aerial warships that operate from shore bases.
63
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
The use of aircraft over the sea did not develop
sufficiently during the war for them to exert much
influence over naval operations. The lighter-
than-air vessels performed a certain amount
of useful reconnaissance work, notably the
Zeppelins in the German sortie of August i8th
1916, and the British " blimps " in anti-submarine
patrols. The part played by aircraft in actual
sea fighting, however, was negligible.
The coming of the peace ushered in a period
of great development for naval flying, which
has continued unchecked up to the present time.
Large aircraft carriers were built and the part
that aircraft would play in naval operations began
to receive more and more attention. This process
of development was stimulated by the propaganda
disseminated by the recently created Royal Air
Force, anxious to consolidate its position as an
independent service. Claims began to be heard
that the new and rapidly growing air weapon
would soon supersede navies altogether. It was
claimed in particular that aircraft would be able
to bomb the battleship out of existence, an
assertion that gave rise to the well-known " bomb
V. battleship " controversy, a controversy which
is by no means extinguished to-day.
The fact that the verbal projectiles of the
early Air Force enthusiasts were directed mainly
against the surface warship may account for the
64
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AIR WEAPON
fact that for a good many years it was this aspect
of air development that monopoHsed the attention
of both sailors and airmen. The Admiralty saw
the problem in terms of battleships. On the one
hand, how best could the air weapon be utilised
in the attack on the enemy's battleships, and on the
other, how could our battleships be protected
against aerial attack by the enemy ? The solution
to the first part of the problem was comparatively
simple. Having built all the aircraft carriers that
the Washington ratios allowed, the Admiralty
proceeded to supply battleships and cruisers with
as many catapult aircraft as it was felt the ships
could take without prejudice to their fighting
quality. The solution to the defensive problem
was more open to question. There was passive
defence by gunfire from the ships themselves ;
or there was active defence by means of fighter
aircraft who would shoot down the attacking planes
before they could drop their projectiles. There
were several drawbacks to the active method. The
great speed of aircraft made the period of approach
of attacking planes so short that it was doubtful
if the defending fighters, if kept on deck until the
attackers were reported coming, could get into
the air in time to meet the attack. If, however,
a constant fighter patrol were kept in the air, it
had necessarily to be so weak as to throw doubt
on its power to provide adequate protection.
6s
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
From the first, therefore, passive defence by
gunfire was adopted as one essential element at
least of anti-aircraft defence. Moreover, as air-
craft speeds grew higher and higher with the
passing of the years, we find also more and more
reliance being placed on anti-aircraft gunfire for
the defence of battleships and other surface
ships. So much so, in fact, that the last two or
three years have witnessed the conversion of
old cruisers into special anti-aircraft gun vessels.
At the time of writing two cruisers have been so
converted, but it is understood that a number
of others are to undergo the same treatment.
This allocation of an appreciable amount of our
admittedly inadequate cruiser tonnage to the
duty of anti-aircraft gun vessel is expressive of the
great reliance the Admiralty had come to place
on this form of anti-aircraft defence. The same
reliance on anti-aircraft fire is again indicated
in this speech of Sir Samuel Hoare's when
introducing the 1937 naval estimates : —
" Of all the targets that air forces might
attack, the fleet was the least attractive target
that any possible enemy might select. He
did not want to put the case too high or to
suggest that, because it was such an unattractive
target, no enemy would ever attack a fleet.
What he said was that a fleet of this kind
66
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AIR WEAPON
would be SO unattractive a target that an enemy
was likely to think twice or thrice before
attacking it."
It has to be noted that this confidence
of the Admiralty's in the anti-aircraft gun to
deal with attacking aircraft is inconsistent with
the partiality it has shown, and particularly so
in recent years, for the aircraft carrier. This
country has notably taken the lead in the con-
struction of these vessels, having ten built,
building or projected against six of any other
power. Now carriers are expensive vessels, the
new ones costing with their aircraft the best
part of £4,000,000. But the greater the ability
of the anti-aircraft artillery on or surrounding the
battleships to defeat the aircraft, the less obviously
must be the value of the aircraft carrier as a factor
in battle. For either the aircraft is no real danger
to the battleship, in which case it would seem that
a good deal of the very considerable tonnage we
are devoting to carriers could better be allocated
to some other class of ship ; or else the anti-
aircraft gun is not really so effective against
aircraft after all, in which case the great confidence
that the Admiralty is evidently placing in anti-
aircraft fire would seem to be misplaced. So far
as battle is concerned, therefore, an official
policy that aims at taking a lead in aircraft carriers
67
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
and also in anti-aircraft cruisers must be founded
on a contradiction. Apart from battle the utility
of carriers would appear to be limited, for they
are too large and therefore too few to play much
part in the defence of trade. It is true that I
ha;/e heard it suggested that they would be useful
for carrying out air raids on an enemy's territory.
Wars, however, are not won by bombing coastal
towns and villages and it is not to be thought
that the Admiralty would build large ships with
such a purpose as that in view. If, therefore, Sir
Samuel Hoare was indeed correct in saying that
aircraft would think not twice but thrice before
attacking a battle fleet, our expenditure of
^20,000,000 on new aircraft-carriers seems to
need some explaining away.
What light do the post-war years throw on the
problem of air attack on warships and the efficacy
or otherwise of anti-aircraft fire as a means
of defence ? There have been a certain number
of incidents in recent years in which aircraft
and men-of-war have come into hostile contact.
There was the Greek naval rebellion of 1935,
when aircraft were sent out to bomb the rebel
cruiser Averoff. There was the Dutch naval
revolt in the Far East a couple of years earlier,
when they were similarly sent to deal with a
mutinous battleship. And there has been the
evidence of the Spanish war. In all these cases,
68
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AIR WEAPON
the achievements of the aircraft have been
poor and a long way below what the air enthusiasts
claimed would be the case. This has been parti-
cularly so in the Spanish war where, for example,
the insurgent warships blockading Bilbao steamed
slowly about for days on end without apparently
suffering damage or even inconvenience from
the Government aircraft. These vessels would
seem to have furnished ideal targets for aircraft.
It is proper to remember, however, that all
these instances were connected with civil wars,
in which all the motives normally at work in
warfare between sovereign States may not be
present. While the contestants in civil war may
not be reluctant to kill off the persons of their
opponents, they may not be so anxious to sink
or destroy the other side's warships, which after
all belong to their common country and will still
be needed for national defence which ever side
wins. It is conceivable that such considerations
may disincline the contestants in civil conflicts
to make a thorough-going test of the destructive
powers of aircraft against warships.
The same sentiments would not, of course,
apply to air attacks against commercial vessels,
such as suspected blockade runners, especially
when they are foreigners. In this direction, the
Spanish war provides more evidence. At the
time of writing, over ten British ships have been
69
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
sunk by air attack and a larger number hit and
damaged. On the other hand, there have been a
good many instances of ships being unsuccess-
fully attacked from the air, the bomb marks-
manship being often extremely bad.
When we turn to the Chinese war, we leave the
sphere of internal strife and come to ordinary
warfare in which no modifying influences play
a part. The evidence here, such as it is, does not
seem to support the aircraft against the ship.
The Japanese flagship lay in the Whampao river
off" Shanghai for months and was attacked con-
tinually by Chinese aircraft without being hit.
The Chinese may not, of course, be very good
shots, and any European airmen who might
have been flying their planes would presumably
not be highly trained bombing pilots. Did not
the more professional Japanese sink the Panay ?
True, they did ; but there again, it has to be
remembered that the Americans were taken by
surprise and that the Panay's means of defence
were not exactly powerful. Taken all round, the
results of the air attack against ships cannot be
called impressive.
The same can equally be said of the gunnery
results against the aircraft. British warships
have on several occasions opened fire on aircraft
during the Spanish war, without I think one
70
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AIR WEAPON
success. In the Chinese war, if the Chinese
bombing marksmanship against the Japanese
was hopelessly bad, the Japanese anti-aircraft
fire against the Chinese planes does not seem to
have been very much better. The testimony of
the Chinese war on the air problem seems in fact
to be more negative than positive.
Such are the lessons of experience up to date.
It may quite reasonably be argued that they are
inconclusive, and that with the more highly-
trained air forces or anti-aircraft gunners that
several countries are no doubt sure they possess
the results would be very different. Quite possibly
they would. Nevertheless, the results, as they are,
are below the estimates.
While, therefore, the full potentialities of the
air weapon in a first-class European war can so
far only be guessed at, the indications are that it
is not likely to sweep the surface warship from the
seas in the way that was once claimed for it.
The same claim was made, though less vociferously,
for the submarine before the war, but when
the time came it was found that the underwater
vessel, though it added greatly to the complication
of naval warfare, was not able to keep the surface
vessel, in one form or another, from fulfilling
its customary role. There is no reason yet to
think that the new aerial element in naval fighting
71
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
will again prove any more than an added compli-
cation or that it will be able to change the whole
face of naval warfare.
But though it may quite well be argued from
the available evidence that the practical results
likely to be achieved by naval aircraft in the
next war are much less than is commonly believed,
it would be a mistake to assume that their influence
over naval operations will be small. That influence
may be much greater than the actual results
achieved by them would warrant. We noticed in
Chapter II the striking moral effect produced by
the submarine over the operations of the Grand
Fleet in the last war. Yet the practical achieve-
ments against that fleet were so small as to be
almost trifling. Two light cruisers were success-
fully torpedoed and sunk on August 19th, 1916.
Apart from that, not one ship of the Grand Fleet
was sunk by a submarine, and not one battleship
of that fleet was even hit by a submarine's torpedo.
The great moral influence of the submarine
is derived from its unseen approach and from its
use of the dreaded underwater weapon. It is
quite possible that the aircraft may exert a
comparably powerful moral influence and for
generally similar if not exactly identical reasons.
The aircraft cannot expect to approach unseen in
the way that was possible to the submarine
in the last war, but by means of cloud-flying
72
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AIR WEAPON
something not far short of that unseen approach
may be attainable. Even in cloudless weather,
the disadvantage of the aircraft's open approach
will be very largely nullified by its great speed,
which by reducing the period between the first
sighting and the delivery of the attack to seconds
rather than minutes should produce most of the
elements of surprise.
The attacking aircraft will have the choice of
bomb or torpedo. In popular discussions of the
air problem the use of the torpedo is largely
overlooked. For the public, the question is always
one of " bomb v. battleship," never torpedo. Yet
it is possible that the torpedo may be the more
promising aerial weapon of the two for use at sea.
The mathematical chances of hitting a line of
ships with a torpedo fired from 2,000 yards are a
good deal greater than those of hitting with a
bomb from 6,000 feet. Moreover the damage to
be expected from the explosion of a non-contact
torpedo is probably much greater on the average
than that from a bomb. The torpedo exploding
somewhere under the bottom can hardly fail to
inflict a grave injury. The bomb coming from
above may explode in some comparatively in-
nocuous compartment inside the ship. For these
reasons, the possibility of aerial torpedo attack
may appear more forbidding to an admiral than
attack by bomb.
F 73
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
But though the material destructiveness of the
bomb may be less to be feared, it carries a novel
and unpleasant menace that is all its own. This is
its power of attacking the personnel of men-of-war
rather than the material, and of attacking it
unawares. In battle, the ship's company of a
big ship is distributed all over the ship, a good
deal of it behind armour or otherwise under
protection. At other times, a surprise emergency
due to being torpedoed by a submarine or to
striking a mine results in damage to the ship
more than to loss of life among the crew. Surprise
attack by bomb from the air, on the other hand,
may catch the men at their ease on the mess decks,
where they will be both unprotected and collected
under crowded conditions that will enable the
bomb to wreak the utmost havoc, as occurred in
the case of the Deutschland.
This unpleasant possibility must in future
add not a little to the strain of naval warfare,
for it means that whenever men-of-war are within
reach of attack by hostile aircraft, the normal life
of the ship cannot go on without exposing the
officers and men to decimation by a lucky bomb
exploding in their living quarters. The moral
effect due to air attack will hardly, however, be
affected by whichever of the two weapons, bomb
or torpedo, is used on any particular occasion.
Moral effect is born of the threat and not of the
74
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AIR WEAPON
reality, and where two dangers of differing serious-
ness are both equally possible, it is in human
nature to make mental allowance for the graver of
the two.
The admiral of a surface fleet who pins his
faith to the orthodox gun duel between the
rival battleships is likely to be as little anxious
to expose his ships to the untoward consequences
of sporadic air attack as his predecessors of the
Great War were to brave the risks of submarines
and mines. And he will probably entertain this
feeling more pronouncedly towards shore-based
than ship-borne aircraft. Attack by ship-borne
aircraft will mean that there are enemy carriers
or other large men-of-war within flying range
which his own aircraft or ships can counter-
attack. Against attack by shore-based aircraft
he will be mostly unable to retaliate, and for that
reason will be all the more desirous of avoiding
their attentions. Whenever therefore an admiral
may feel concerned to preserve his vessels from
avoidable damage — as for instance the com-
paratively few and consequently precious capital
ships of present-day navies — he is bound to
experience a reluctance to take them within the
effective zone of the enemy coastal air bases. To
penetrate this zone will be to expose himself to
the danger of repeated torpedo or bomb attacks
and will place him in the anxious dilemma of
75
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
condemning his men to long periods closed up at
action stations or of exposing them to severe
casualties if given their normal and necessary
relaxation. One effect of the air weapon in future
must be to hamper and restrict the operations
of surface fleets over and above those restrictions
already imposed by mines and submarines.
This restrictive influence that the air seems
destined to exert will necessarily vary with the
size of the ship. Just as great reluctance was
shown in the last war to expose the large and
therefore comparatively scarce capital ships to
mine or torpedo, but a good deal less solicitude
was manifested for the immunity of destroyers
and other small craft, so may we expect a greater
readiness in the future to allow the smaller
and more numerous ships to brave the dangers
of air attack than the larger ones. In the last
war the great ship went in fear of the submarine.
It will not be surprising if it goes in fear of the
aircraft as well in the next.
The probable inclination on the part of warships
to keep out of reach of enemy shore-based aircraft
must also affect the position of naval bases. An
admiral who may feel reluctant to lead his fleet
within effective range of hostile aerodromes will
feel even less disposed to use a base within the
same zone. To do so is to expose his ships to
damage under specially unfavourable conditions ;
76
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AIR WEAPON
that is, when they are motionless at anchor and
are powerless to take avoiding action. It means
also that the personnel will be liable to continuous
harassment in what corresponds to their rest
billets. There must therefore be a natural desire
to make use of naval bases outside the coastal
air zone. The farther bases are removed from the
enemy's coast, however, the less the strategical
value of the base from the naval point of view,
a complication which must become more and more
embarrassing as the range of aircraft steadily
increases. The time is likely to come before
very long, if indeed it has not already arrived,
when naval bases cannot be sited outside hostile
coastal air zones without taking the fleet too far
away to keep an effective watch on the enemy's
ships. The Mediterranean is a case in point.
In 1935 the close proximity of Malta to the
Italian coast caused the British Mediterranean
Fleet to remove itself to Alexandria. Now,
however, that no part of the Eastern Mediterranean
can be regarded as outside the range of Italian
aircraft, a similar retirement would not have the
same utility. In fact, with the arrival of aircraft
of transatlantic range, the point seems to have
been reached where fleets cannot be kept clear
of shore-based aircraft, and will have to put up
with air attack in their bases if they are to
continue to exercise their proper functions.
77
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
So far we have been considering the influence
of the air on the operations of the battle fleets.
What now of its bearing on other aspects of naval
warfare such as trade protection or attack. The
aeroplane shares with the submarine the ability
to pnove in three dimensions instead of two.
We may therefore be sure that for it, too, distant
cover by a superior battle fleet will be ineffective
in preventing it reaching its objective. Whereas
the submarine can dive under the battle fleet on
its way to attack trade, the airplane can fly over
the top of it for the same purpose. Nor does it
seem possible for defending aircraft to exercise
the principle of *' cover " in the air that the
warship can develop against its own kind on the
surface. We may conclude, therefore, that the
same principle of defence will apply in both
cases ; namely that if trade is to be defended
against air attack the defence must be provided
on the spot. In other words, shipping must be
given some form of anti-aircraft defence. What
form this should take will be discussed in later
chapters.
Summarising the evidence we have reviewed
regarding the power of aircraft, there is reason
to think that it is a good deal less than has generally
been expected. Encouraged by the non-realisation
of the more extreme claims previously made for
the air, there are a number of naval officers who
78
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AIR WEAPON
are now saying that the air will prove a negligible
factor in future naval warfare. Admitting that
much of the evidence of the Spanish and Chinese
wars is in these officers' favour, I should never-
theless be more inclined to agree with them did
I not remember that exactly the same thing
was said of the submarine before 1914. As it turned
out, the material damage the latter caused to
the warship fleets was comparatively small, while
its moral influence over them was great. On the
other hand, while it caused great destruction
among merchant shipping, its moral eff^ect on
their movements was unexpectedly small ; to the
surprise and confusion of the Germans and the
great honour of their officers and crews. It would
not be surprising if the influence of the airplane
were to be generally similar.
79
CHAPTER VI
INVASION
Having now examined the use of sea power in
the last war and having traced the principal
developments that have occurred during the
interval between the Armistice and the present
time, we are in a position to estimate what effect
these developments are likely to have in a naval
war of the immediate future.
As mentioned in Chapter I, the value of sea
power is to be measured in terms of the sea
communications. Its importance lies in the power
it can give to one side or the other to use the sea
highways for its own purposes and correspondingly
to deny them to the enemy. This use of the sea
highways has two main aspects, one dealing with
invasion and the other with trade and supplies.
In this chapter we will examine the question of
invasion.
Since the principles of naval strategy first
began to be properly understood, the feasibility
of overseas invasion has been a question of the
superiority or inferiority of the surface fleets.
80
INVASION
Generally speaking, the side with the most
powerful fleet could send its armies across the sea
to attack any selected enemy territory, either his
home territory or his overseas possessions, and
the inferior side could not. If the latter tried to
do so, the expedition was liable to be set upon by
the superior fleet and either destroyed or captured.
In the last two or three centuries, this unpleasant
possibility has been sufficient to deter any ruler or
government from attempting a serious invasion
of its enemy's home territory in the face of his
superior fleet. Napoleon, standing on the shore
at Boulogne with his " Army of England " behind
him, would not embark on his attempt until the
French fleet could gain command, if only tem-
porary command, of the Channel ; which it
never did. Minor raids, whose failure would not
be regarded as a severe reverse, might be
attempted. The poor communications and the
slow and uncertain speed of ships in the old sailing
days gave such raids a fair chance of getting away
and reaching their destination undiscovered ; as
for example the French raids on Ireland. Even
so, the record of such raids is one of almost
unbroken failure.
The great improvements in the means of
communication and in the propulsion and speed
of ships during the nineteenth century made
things even more difficult for the invader, and the
8i
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
difficulty was still further enhanced by the growing
complexity of army weapons and equipment.
The requirements of an army have increased so
much in diversity and volume in the last hundred
years that an army corps, which in Napoleon's
tiijie could be put ashore to live very largely on
the country, would now require a daily supply
of over a thousand tons of provisions, ammunition,
barbed wire and military stores of all kinds, all
from its own transports. So hazardous in fact
had any sort of overseas military expedition
become by 19 14 for the inferior naval power that
no such attempt was made by any of the Central
Powers during the war, except in the case of the
Oesel Island expedition by the Germans in the
Baltic, in which sea they happened to enjoy the
naval superiority.
At the outbreak of the war, the superior naval
power still enjoyed his historic freedom to send
his armies across the sea as he pleased. It was
not long however before it became clear that for
him, too, the progress of science had begun to
exercise a hampering effect. The submarine was
still a new and only partly developed weapon in
1 9 1 4. The British military lines of communication
with France were moreover so short and therefore
well guarded as to afford the submarine little
scope. The Dardanelles expedition gave it a
better opportunity to show its power. The
82
INVASION
expedition had gone to waters which at the time
were free of submarines, and it went to work in
the traditional manner. Clustered round the
beaches were the transports and the battleships,
cruisers, destroyers and other small craft of the
supporting fleet. Exactly one month after the
landing, a submarine arrived out from Germany
and torpedoed one and then another of the
battleships. The effect was impressive. The
best part of that great array of shipping, warships
and transports, hurriedly dispersed and, like
rabbits going to ground, disappeared into distant
harbours ; all except the destroyers and small
craft, who now became a ferry service between the
sheltering transports and the beaches. The army
however was well established ashore by that time
and had a reserve of supplies on land with it.
Had the submarines been present at Gallipoli a
month earlier, it is safe to say that the landing
would not have been attempted.
Since then, measures for dealing with submarines
have made much headway, as described in a
previous chapter. Even with these improvements,
however, it is very doubtful if transports anchored
off an open stretch of coast could be adequately
protected against submarine attack at the present
time. To give an expedition that reasonable
degree of anti-submarine protection to render an
opposed landing a practical operation it would
83
Mi
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
almost certainly be necessary to find an enclosed
harbour which could be netted in and made
submarine-proof.
This limiting condition must detract to no
inconsiderable extent from the military chances of
th^ expedition's success as an invading force.
It has always been rightly held that the greatest
source of strength of a sea-borne military force
lies in its power to effect surprise through its
ability to select any point on the enemy's coast
for its landing, provided only that boats could be
beached there. If the selection is now to be
narrowed down to the always comparatively few
good harbours, the previous element of surprise
must be very much reduced and the task of the
defenders made correspondingly simpler.
Air power is likely to add yet further to the
disabilities already imposed on an invading force
by the submarine. If the latter tends to reduce
the highly important element of surprise by
restricting the choice of landing beaches, the
airplane should be able to reduce surprise still
more by reason of its great powers of recon-
naissance. With the large and increasing ranges
of modern aircraft, it should in many cases be
possible to keep up an air patrol sufficiently far
to seaward to sight an approaching expedition
the evening before its arrival. Its sighting a
long way out at sea should enable the calling up
84
INVASION
of intercepting submarines and of destroyer
forces to attack the vulnerable convoy during
the dark hours. Air observation also imposes on
the invaders that difficult operation a dawn
landing as the alternative to having their final
approach accurately reported from the air. The
air will also be of direct assistance to the defenders
by allowing troops to be moved to the threatened
spot by troop-carrying aircraft, as an even
swifter means of concentration than that due
to modern motorised transport.
Nor will the contribution of aircraft be limited to
reconnaissance. Since the number of ship-borne
aircraft available to an expedition is likely always
to be comparatively small relative to the great
quantities of shore-based aircraft that the nations
are now engaged in producing, an expedition once
discovered may well be subject to frequently
recurring bomb and torpedo attacks as it ap-
proaches its anchorage, and the troops to bombing
and machine-gunning during their disembarkation.
The submarine, the airplane, and wireless
telegraphy have each and all added to the strength
of the defence against invasion. To the superior
naval power these extra safeguards come as
additions to the security traditionally due to
the possession of the stronger surface fleet. To
the weaker surface power they come as some sort
of a substitute for its inferiority on the surface.
85
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
It may be true to say that invasion has never
succeeded without surface superiority. It would
be by no means true to say that surface superiority
ensures success. It did not ensure success at
GallipoH, for although the Anglo-French surface
superiority in the Mediterranean was un-
challeriged and sufficed to bring the expedition
to the beaches in complete safety, it was only with
great difficulty that the troops managed to land
and even then they eventually had to come away.
The progressive strengthening of the defence
since that time will have made it, in the average
case, even more difficult for the troops to get
ashore.
The invasion of a country that possesses the
command at sea had by 19 14 become so un-
promising as not to offer even that outside chance
that justifies a risky undertaking. The Germans
certainly had never any thought of despatching
any sort of military expedition against this country,
though our own authorities were always un-
necessarily fearful lest they might. Indeed, the
odds on our inflicting a resounding defeat on any
such expedition, with the probability of a fleet
action thrown in, were so promising that we
ought to have done our best to encourage the
Germans to make the attempt, by keeping Britain
invitingly denuded of troops. Instead, we did
the opposite. Nowadays, with the air as an
86
INVASION
additional safeguard, the danger of invasion to
the superior naval power is, if possible, even
more remote.
For Great Britain, moreover, invasion is an
academic rather than a practical subject ; for if
the defeat of our surface fleet were to take place,
which alone would make it practicable, the victor
would have no need to waste his military strength
on storming bullet-swept beaches. He could
starve us into submission without risking the
life of a single grenadier.
For more self-supporting countries who might
be also inferior at sea, such as Australia and New
Zealand, invasion is a more real possibility ;
and for them the strengthening of the defence
is a factor of importance, whose value will be
considered in a later chapter.
87
CHAPTER VII
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
Operations in connection with sea-borne trade
resolve themselves into those of attack and
defence. For this country, defence must take
priority. Absolutely dependent as v^e are on
sea-borne imports for the maintenance of ourselves
and our industries, and on exports for the preserva-
tion of our credit, the defence of our overseas
communications must be regarded as a prior
charge to attack on the enemy's. Not until we
have satisfied ourselves on the first item can we
legitimately go on to the second. Moreover,
the defence aspect of overseas communications
is far and away more difficult than that of attack.
In the last war, we were for a time at our wits*
end to protect our trade against the German
submarine attack. Never at any time, however,
did we experience any particular difficulty in
intercepting enemy or contraband trade. It is
true that the geographical factor made things
easy for us. Nevertheless, the experience of
the French wars suggests that, even under much
less favourable conditions, the problem of the
88
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
attack will always be far less troublesome than
that of defence. It is therefore proposed to deal
here principally with the problem of defence of
our overseas communications. If we are able
to solve that problem to our own satisfaction we
may rest confident that the attack on a future
enemy's trade will not be beyond our capacity.
When we speak about our overseas com-
munications, we naturally think mainly of our
trade, since the bulk of our shipping on the
high seas is necessarily engaged in the transport
of commercial goods. In wartime, the term
communications must also cover the movement
of troops by sea. We considered the question of
invasion in the last chapter, but chiefly from the
point of view of the final assault on the hostile
territory. So far as concerns their passage over
the ocean to the near vicinity of their landing
place, the problem of the protection of the trans-
port is virtually the same as that of ordinary
trading vessels. Both are covered by the term
** sea-borne communications." While, therefore,
extra precautions are always taken over the
protection of troop transports, the general
principles of their defence are the same as for
commercial shipping.
In the last war we had to protect our com-
munications against two forms of attack, surface
and submarine. In the next war the problem
G 89
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
will be made even harder by the addition of a
third danger from the air. If this air attack on
commerce is to be at all effective it must necessarily
be of the " unrestricted " variety. The existing
international law on the subject of trade attack
demands the observance of ** visit and search "
as a prelude to capture or destruction, and in the
latter alternative it ordains that the crew must
first be put in a place of safety, a condition that
the use of the ship's boats is deemed not to
satisfy. Now the airplane cannot observe these
rules. In its present stage of development it
can neither conduct visit and search nor can it
provide any greater security than the ship's
boats for the passengers and crew. Consequently,
if it is to be used for the attack on commerce,
it can only do so in violation of International
Law. The same thing applies also to the
submarine. It, too, can only be a serious threat to
trade by disregarding the existing rules of war
and indulging in *' unrestricted " submarine war-
fare. What is the likelihood of the rules being
observed ? It was mentioned in an earlier chapter
that the Washington Conference had affirmed the
illegality of unrestricted submarine warfare and
that as late as 1936 Germany and Russia had
subscribed to this affirmation, thus making the
signatories Britain, the United States, Japan,
France, Germany, Russia and Italy. No such
90
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
convention has, however, been drawn up in regard
to air attack, which remains legally free of limita-
tions. It seems likely, however, that the use of the
air and the submarine weapons against commerce
will go hand in hand. If a country is prepared to
disregard international opinion by engaging in
unrestricted air attack it is hardly to be expected
that it would be scrupulously exact in its utilisation
of the submarine.
What then are the prospects of the limiting
conditions agreed to regarding submarine warfare
being observed in practice ? Very little, I suggest.
The sanction for the condemnation of unrestricted
submarine warfare lies in the humanitarian senti-
ment that deplores the endangering of the lives
of the non-combatant crews (and passengers) of
peaceful merchant ships. But if the nations are
prepared, as everyone takes it for granted that
they are, to rain death and destruction on civilian
populations from the air, there is absolutely no
reason at all why they should harbour any greater
consideration for the officers and men of merchant
ships. The air bombing of civilians that is even
now going on in two continents implies the
complete disappearance of any mitigating factor
in warfare of the future. We must therefore
regretfully accept unrestricted submarine and
air attacks against trade as a probable feature of
the next war.
91
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
That being so, we have to admit that the defence
of trade has become a more intricate problem
than it has hitherto been. The addition of air
attack has brought with it the compHcation that
this attack may be made either by ship-borne or
by shore-based aircraft. Since it seems Ukely
that 'the attack on trade by shore-based aircraft
will prove much more formidable than that by
the ship-borne variety, the problem of defence may
differ considerably according to whether the
mercantile shipping requiring protection is inside
or outside the range of hostile coastal aircraft,
and in the former case, whether the hostile coastal
zone is or is not flanked by British territory.
It is therefore proposed to divide the problem
up into three representative cases, those of the
protection of trade in Home waters, where both
foreign and British coastal zones will affect the
issue ; in the Mediterranean, where foreign
coastal aircraft may provide the chief air com-
ponent ; and thirdly, in the open ocean, where
coastal aircraft can play no part at all. The
remainder of this chapter will be devoted to the
first of these cases.
The home terminals of British trade are neces-
sarily the places where that trade is the most
exposed to attack if it can be got at ; for it is there
that all the various mercantile streams from the
different parts of the world come together as
92
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
they approach the British Isles. It was there
that the German submarines found their most
fruitful hunting-ground in the last war ; in the
Western approaches, in the English Channel, in
the North and St. George's Channels and the
Irish Sea. The most promising area of all was
that covering the approaches to the great Port
of London, but that region happened to be
unpropitious for submarines, being profuse in
shallows, sandbanks and strong tides, all of which
the submarine dislikes.
Should we go to war with Germany again, we
ought to be prepared for a renewal of that
submarine warfare. The whole of her naval
policy points in that direction. In the first place,
her agreement to a one-third ratio of surface
forces shows that she has abandoned any idea of
competing with us for the surface command.
Secondly, she is pushing on very fast with the
construction of submarines, having completed
30 in the last two years and having 30 more under
construction. It is only prudent to think that
this rapid submarine building is being done with
a view to their employment in the same manner
as in the last war, a surmise that is not contradicted
by an opinion expressed to Lieutenant-Colonel
P. T. Etherton by the Ex-Crown Prince in 1933,
that '' the next naval war will not be fought on
the water but below it ; and that submarines
93
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
will largely decide the issue to be fought out by
the rival navies."^
Against a recurrence of the German submarine
campaign against trade, we should need to
employ the same counter-measures as before,
namely convoy and escort. While, however,
the introduction of convoy will this time be a
straightforward matter, for which it has been
officially stated that preparations are ready, the
supply of escorts is in a less fortunate state than
it was in 1917. What defeated the submarine in
the last war was the introduction of convoy
coupled with the employment of very large
numbers of convoy escorts and anti-submarine
small craft. It is important to notice that these
two factors were interdependent. Convoy was
the right policy to adopt, but its adoption depended
on adequate numbers of convoy protection vessels
being available. So much was this the case that
the Admiralty of 19 17 was always complaining
that it had not got enough escorts to protect the
convoys if they were formed. Yet even before
convoy was generally introduced we had about 400
escort vessels (destroyers, sloops and patrol boats)
available for convoy work, besides several
thousands of trawlers, drifters and other auxiliary
vessels patrolling the Channel approaches.
What is the position now ? At the present
^ Sunday Express, May 8th, 1938.
94
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
moment our total available supply of escort
vessels (destroyers, sloops, patrol boats) is i8o,
and we have 50 building. From our present 180,
we must subtract at least 60 destroyers which
would be required for work with the battleships,
a similar or larger number employed in that
way in the last war being additional to the 400
escort vessels previously mentioned. On a direct
comparison, therefore, we can now only muster
about 120 convoy escorts, as against the 400
that were regarded as barely sufficient in 19 17.
Moreover, our total of trawlers, drifters and other
small craft has also declined.
Now, we have noted in a previous chapter that
the invention since the war of a submarine
detecting device has rendered the task of the
submarine a good deal more hazardous. At
the same time, we questioned whether Sir Samuel
Hoare was justified in his somewhat sweeping
assertion that the submarine was no longer a
menace to this country. And there is another
aspect of the case that seems to indicate that
Sir Samuel may have been allowing his optimism
to run away with him. The new detecting device,
though it has undoubtedly improved the escorting
vessels' prospects of dealing successfully with
submarine attack on a convoy, has done nothing
to reduce the number of escorts required to do
so. Indeed, the efficacy of the new gear is to a
95
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
great extent dependent on there being a certain
number of vessels available to operate it. Since,
therefore, we now have only about a third of the
escorts — or under a half when the existing
programme is completed — that the Admiralty
considered necessary for the proper protection
of our 1:onvoys in the last war, we seem to have a
very serious shortage in vessels of this type.
For, as things are, we appear to be faced with the
alternative of reducing the number of escorts
allotted to each convoy a long way below what is
necessary, or of leaving well over half our trade
without escorts at all.
There is, as we have earlier agreed, a chance
that aircraft may prove a useful ally to trade
against the submarine. While allowance is proper
to be made for this possibility, it is very question-
able whether it can wisely be held to compensate
for our apparent very serious shortage of escort
vessels as compared with the last war. On the basis
of that experience, we shall still be over 200 of
these ships short of requirements even when those
that are now building have joined the fleet.
But so far from the Admiralty speeding up the
construction of this type it is actually doing the
opposite ; for in the original building programme
for 1938, it omitted to make any provision for
escort vessels at all. The omission gave rise to a
good deal of comment and criticism in Parliament,
96
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
and caused no little surprise in professional circles,
where it seemed altogether inexplicable that, while
provision could be made for almost every other
class of ship, and particularly for depot ships and
submarines, the escort classes, destroyers, sloops,
and similar vessels, of which we stood most in
need were just those that found no place in the
programme. It is difficult, in fact, not to regard
the Admiralty's apparent attitude of complacency
towards the submarine danger without a definite
feeling of anxiety. The recent increases in the
submarine fleets of the totalitarian powers have
been impressive. It is impossible to think that
the Admiralty can be placing such complete
reliance on the observance of international under-
takings not to engage in unrestricted submarine
warfare against commerce as to be taking no
precautions against their breach. But if not, it
seems to be discounting one of the most dearly-
bought lessons of the last war to an extent that
the acquisition of any new defensive measures
against the submarine cannot be thought to
justify. One naturally inclines to assume that
the Admiralty is fully alive to what it is doing
and has plans ready to meet all eventualities.
At the same time it is only prudent to remember
that it has more than once shown a disinclination
to take a sufficiently serious view of the submarine
danger. Prior to 19 14, it tended to make light
97
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
of the underwater craft. The result was that
the outbreak of war found us with no anti-
submarine defences for the principal naval base.
Again, during the war, despite the deal warnings
Germany gave us in 191 5 and 1916 of the
possibility of unrestricted submarine warfare,
the actual commencement of that warfare in
19 1 7 discovered us largely unprepared to deal
with it.
Then we come to the air. Assuming again
that we are at war with Germany, to what extent
would our merchant shipping be in danger from
air attack .? First of all, what form of air attack
is to be apprehended ? Will it be ship-borne or
shore-based ? A moment's reflection will make
it clear that ship-borne attack is extremely
unlikely. The Germans would hardly expose
expensive aircraft carriers to the risk of destruction
by our own surface vessels or aircraft when they
could get the same or a better result by means of
aircraft flown over from German land aerodromes.
It is shore-based aircraft which would be the
danger. If so, how would they be likely to act ?
Practically the whole of the Channel and the
East Coast of England must now be regarded as
within practical bombing range of aerodromes
inside the present German frontiers. We can
certainly say that the North Sea as far as the
Humber and the Channel as far as Portsmouth
98
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
are within comfortable bombing range. That
means that a long stretch of the approaches to
the Port of London is exposed to shore-based
air attack, whether the trade were routed by the
Channel or north about round Scotland.
The crowded funnel of the Thames Estuary
itself is almost the nearest point of all to Germany.
This small and highly vulnerable terminal region
into which something like 40 per cent, of our
import trade converges seems therefore to form
the most promising point of attack, especially
since the tendency of recent years has been to
extend the list of commodities, all or nearly all
of which are handled by London's port ; and
since, moreover, the existing organisation for
feeding the population of London itself has
grown up round the Port of London, as being
the centre of distribution.
In planning an attack on a converging stream of
enemy supplies, the most profitable place to
choose is the point of final junction, if it can be
got at. In this case it can be got at ; for the
stream of supplies bound for London meets
ultimately in the London docks. If enemy
aircraft can bomb the docks, they can not only
attack our shipping in its most concentrated and
therefore most vulnerable state, but they may
also be able to demolish the dock gates, the transit
sheds, the unloading apparatus, and the railway
99
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
sidings, all of them essential elements in the
process of discharging the cargoes after the ships
that carry them have reached port. What is
the chance of hostile bombers being able thus to
cut short London's supplies by smashing up the
organization for handling them at the point of
arrivaf ? No one knows. Defence in the shape
of anti-aircraft guns, fighter aircraft and balloon
barrages might be able to keep them off sufficiently
to prevent decisive damage being done ; or it
might not. It seems to be generally accepted
that it is extremely difficult to prevent attacking
aircraft, or some of them at all events, getting
through to their target. How much damage they
will do to a well-defended target when they have
reached it remains however an unknown factor.
We must not close our eyes to the possibility
that enemy bombers might be able to paralyse
the Port of London by smashing up the docks
or dislocating the unloading organisation. Again,
they might not.
If they could not, then it is possible that they
might transfer their operations farther down
stream where the defence is less easily staged ;
namely, the sea approaches to London. The
hydrographical features of the Thames Estuary,
which we have previously noted as operating as
a deterrent to the submarine, do not present the
same unfriendly countenance to the aircraft.
100
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
While shoals and narrow channels are a bogey
to the underwater vessel, they mean nothing to
the bomber ; but they unpleasantly restrict the
movements of ships desiring to manoeuvre clear
of the bombs.
Defence measures would be considerably more
difficult for ships in the Estuary than for the
docks. The anti-aircraft guns would have to be
transferred from solid ground to the unsteadier
ship, and the number of anti-aircraft gun vessels
required would be large. In proportion, more-
over, as their fire proved effective, a progressively
increasing number of such vessels would be
required, as the attacking aircraft would naturally
endeavour to outflank them by moving down
towards Dover or into the Channel. Again,
balloon barrage might or might not be possible
from a ship platform ; while not only would there
be less warning of the approach of enemy aircraft,
but our own defending aircraft would have to
fly farther from their aerodromes in order to deal
with them. If, therefore, we have had to concede
that the chances of being able to prevent enemy
aircraft from reaching and attacking the docks
are not good, the chances of preventing them
attacking shipping in the Estuary seem even less
promising ; though of course the target is
presented in a more dispersed and therefore less
lOI
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
vulnerable form the farther away from the docks
it is attacked.
Whether or not concentrated air attack on the
London docks or on shipping in or approaching
the Thames Estuary would be stronger than the
defence is a matter which cannot be known till
the timfe comes. It might be found that our own
aircraft could obtain that degree of " air
superiority " over the Straits of Dover and the
Estuary as to provide cover for the docks and
the shipping using them. It might even be
found that the attack was not so very concentrated
after all. It is fair to expect that Germany would
not be at war with us alone and that she might
have her aerial hands distinctly full in dealing
with the air forces of Russia, France and
Czechoslovakia. The hordes of airplanes that we
are inclined to picture as lined up all ready to
descend with a roar on London, its docks, and
its shipping, might therefore have urgent engage-
ments elsewhere.
But while we need not necessarily believe in the
worst, we should be foolish not to prepare for it.
Failure to do so would, if our expectations have
been over-sanguine, precipitate us into even
greater danger than our neglect to prepare against
unrestricted submarine warfare in 191 4, 1915 and
19 16, threw us in 19 17. The question, therefore,
is, what could we do if the Port of London could
102
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
no longer be used ? The answer seems fairly
obvious. If London is too dangerous for shipping,
the latter's port or ports of arrival must be shifted
to the less vulnerable west coast ; and Plymouth,
Avonmouth, Cardiff, Liverpool, Glasgow and
other smaller ports be used to absorb the additional
traffic.
The transference of London's shipping to the
western ports would be no light task. Questions
of the extra dock, transit shed and warehouse
accommodation would need careful attention.
More difficult still is probably the transport
problem, for whereas London's food is now
deposited at its doorstep, it would then have to
be carried a hundred miles or more across country.
The diversion of shipping to the westward would
also mean a serious dislocation of business
connected with the London docks and all the
centuries-old wharfage and warehousing firms
that have served the Port of London. The
magnitude of the task of transferring London's
sea-borne traffic elsewhere is certainly not to be
minimised. But as such transference may become
urgently necessary at a moment's notice, it is very
much to be hoped that the Government's plans
for doing so are fully prepared.
The transference of the ports of arrival to the
west coast would not necessarily take them
beyond bombing range, for it would only add a
103
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
hundred miles or so to the hostile aircraft's
journey, which is not very much in view of the
great range of modern aircraft. Yet that extra
hundred odd miles means a flight right across
England, with greatly increased chance of being
shot down by defending fighters while doing so.
This ^Consideration, together with the substitu-
tion of half a dozen ports for one single one as
the bomber targets, means undoubtedly a great
increase of security.
It may legitimately be asked, however, whether
all this tremendous reorganisation would be of
any avail if London itself is liable to be bombed
to pieces. Certainly, there is no object in making
intricate and expensive arrangements for feeding
London through the western ports if there is
going to be no London left to feed. That is the
great question. Can London be so badly bombed
as to bring England to submission, food or no
food ? The examples of Madrid, Valencia,
Barcelona and Canton suggest not. If Spaniards
and Chinamen can undergo the severe civil
bombings that have recently been their portion
without surrender, there should be no cause to
assume in advance that Englishmen cannot stand
the same punishment. It is fitting also to remem-
ber that such direct attack upon a nation's life
without first overwhelming its armed forces has
never yet been decisive. As Admiral Sir Herbert
104
THE DEFENCE OF TRADE
Richmond has said, "It is a theory only, yet to
be proved." The next war may bring the proof,
but up to now the evidence is wanting.
So far Httle has been said about battleships,
large cruisers and aircraft carriers. The truth is
that they can take little part in the operations
previously considered in this chapter. Battleships
and large cruisers are useless for the direct attack
on the submarine. They are much too large and
unhandy to attack submarines with any prospect
of success, and they are such good targets and
such valuable and important vessels as to become
objects of attack themselves. Against aircraft,
their anti-aircraft batteries might be effective,
but here again they could not be used to protect
other vessels without automatically exposing them-
selves to concentrated air attack, a contingency
that there is every reason to think they will do
their utmost to avoid. Aircraft carriers are
unlikely to be used, for generally similar reasons.
Submarine attack on our commerce, in order to
be effective, has necessarily to take place in the
congested area where trade converges on approach-
ing the British Isles ; in an area therefore which is
bound to be covered by the British coastal
aircraft zone. In that case, Vv^hatever help air-
craft can give in defeating the submarine can be
given just as efficiently by shore-based as by
carrier-borne aircraft, without exposing the large,
H 105
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
expensive, and vulnerable aircraft carriers to the
likelihood of submarine attack. Even less value
would the carrier possess as a source of protection
against shore-based aircraft, for to attempt that
role would be to engage in a duel in which the
carrier is almost certain to come off worst. The
part to be played by the large ship — the battleship,
the large cruiser, the carrier — in a war against
Germany would be limited, as in the last war, to
keeping watch on the large surface forces of the
enemy. Since, therefore, Germany, by accepting
the one-third ratio with us in those classes, has
made it reasonably clear that she does not intend
to fight a surface war against us for the time being,
the function of our large ships in a war against
her seems destined to be a minor one. It will
be on the small vessels, the small cruiser,
the destroyer, the sloop, the patrol boat, that the
main burden of our naval defence is almost
certain to fall in a German war.
io6
CHAPTER VIII
OUR MEDITERRANEAN COMMUNICATIONS
If we were to come to blows with anyone in the
Mediterranean it would presumably be Italy,
allied probably to Germany. We might or might
not be alone. Probably we should not, but let us
assume first of all that we are. Could we in that
case maintain our communications through the
Mediterranean, and if so how } In the first place,
what should we have to contend with ? It is
impossible to scrutinise Italy's fleet without being
struck with the very great number of her small
craft. She has over 80 submarines, the second
biggest fleet of them in the world. She has also
100 torpedo craft and 50 motor torpedo boats.
Her battleships number only 4 though she has 4
building, two of which will not normally be
completed for another three years.
Then there are her air forces ; or, to be more
exact, her shore-based air forces, for she has no
aircraft carriers. Having Sardinia, Sicily and
Libya at her disposal for air bases, she is in a
position to keep aerial watch over a long section
of the through-Mediterranean route from the
107
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
line Sardinia-Algeria to the borders of Egypt,
a distance of 700-800 miles. The narrowest
part of this section is the channel between Sicily
and Africa, which is only 70 miles across. In
this channel stands the island of Pantellaria,
narrowing it still further, which the Italians are
repotted to be fortifying and developing as an
air base. A little farther to the south-eastward
comes Malta, 50 miles from Italian territory.
It can easily be seen that the situation of
British shipping passing through the
Mediterranean in a war against Italy would not
be an agreeable one. For the distance of 700-800
miles, or two and a half days' steaming at 12
knots, that they would be within the Italian
coastal air zone, they would be liable to repeated
attacks from the air. For the same distance or
even longer, they would also be liable to attack
by surface craft and submarine. The passage of
the Sicily-Africa channel in which Pantellaria
stands would be a particularly hazardous one.
For there one could expect them to receive the
concentrated attentions of aircraft, submarines,
destroyers and fast motor boats, under the most
favourable conditions for the attackers ; and the
two latter by night as well as by day.
Could our shipping be given effective protection
against these dangers ? In the first place, could
aircraft from Malta be regarded as playing any
108
OUR MEDITERRANEAN COMMUNICATIONS
appreciable part ? It is extremely doubtful ; as it
would also be imprudent to count on the use of
Malta by the fleet, in view of its great exposure
to air attack from Sicily. The problem then
resolves into that of a fleet based on Gibraltar
ensuring the safe passage of British shipping
along the 1,900 mile route through the
Mediterranean and, in particular, past the bottle-
neck of the Pantellaria Channel.
Convoy of course would be essential ; and the
escorts would need to be substantial. A strong
anti-submarine escort would be required, in view
of the large number of submarines the Italians
possess. An equally strong anti-aircraft escort
is called for. Carriers would be no help, for the
odds are that they would not be able to stand up
to the shore-based aircraft. Reliance would have
to be placed on anti-aircraft gunnery, and probably
a number of special anti-aircraft gun vessels
would be required. But all these escorts, though
possibly competent to deal with aircraft and
submarines, might also be set upon by surface
forces, such as strong bodies of destroyers or
cruisers or even battleships, as their convoy
passed close to Italian territory. In fact, the task
would be nothing less than that of having to
force a passage for a convoy past the Pantellaria
bottle-neck in the face of the whole Italian Navy,
surface and submarine, and of its air forces as
109
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
well. To do this would obviously require the
presence with the convoy of a very substantial
British force. The question is, what sort of
force could be made available .'' Battleships, for
instance ; would they be forthcoming .'' To use
them on regular convoy duty backwards and
forwards through the Middle Sea would be to
expose them continually to air attack, submarine
attack, fast motor boat and destroyer attack.
When we remember that Lord Jellicoe with over
30 capital ships, and a good many more in reserve,
was sent steaming away northwards on August
19th, 191 6, by the report of one submarine,
despite the fact that the High Seas Fleet was
known to be at sea to the southward of him, the
likelihood of our present fifteen ships (with no
reserve) being allowed repeatedly to brave the
attentions of 80 submarines, 50 fast motor
boats, 100 destroyers, and many hundreds of
aircraft, without any hope of a fleet action, seems
slender indeed. Indeed, so long as large battle-
ships are regarded as the foundations of naval
power, it is not to be supposed that they would be
exposed in this way to frequently recurring attack
by small craft, especially when it is remembered
that their presence would provide no extra
protection to the convoy against such attack.
The same may be said of large cruisers, since they,
too, would be more of a target than a shield.
no
OUR MEDITERRANEAN COMMUNICATIONS
What of our smaller craft ? Our patrol boats
and all but three or four of our sloops would be
of little value in this case, because they are more
weakly armed than the average Italian destroyer.
There remain our smaller cruisers and destroyers.
These, however, are nothing like numerous
enough to deal by themselves with the whole
Italian submarine and surface navies, submarines,
destroyers, small cruisers, large cruisers and
battleships, even if we denuded the Channel and
the Thames area of all light cruisers and
destroyers, and threw in the battle fleet cruisers
and destroyers as well.
What chance, therefore, is there of our main-
taining our communications through the
Mediterranean ? If we ourselves were inhabiting
Italy, we should undoubtedly feel confident
enough of being able to stop the passage of
enemy ships through the Mediterranean under
these conditions. If we say that Italians could
not do it, we would seem to be in danger of that
under-valuation of a rival against which history
provides many warnings. That is to say, if we
were fighting alone, as postulated at the beginning
of this chapter. But if we had France on our
side ? We should then have the benefit of the
French bases, the French fleet, and above all the
French shore-based aircraft in Algeria and Tunis.
The latter territory flanks the dangerous Pantellaria
III
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
bottle-neck, and French air protection would
thus be available for the British convoys as they
passed through that perilous area. Would it be
able to defeat the Italian air attacks ? It has to
be admitted that it probably would not. Aircraft
with their high speed are particularly unsuitable
for escorting the comparatively tortoise-like surface
ship, and moreover a system of regular patrol
involves a dissipation of strength that is likely
to render the air escort inferior to a concentrated
force of aircraft attacking at its own selected
moment. The principle of " cover " is generally
agreed to have only a fraction of the application
in the air that it has on the surface, and the
chances of air attack getting through seems to be
greater than its chances of being intercepted.
Surface defence, if added to air defence, might, of
course, make the difference. The question is
whether the addition of the French to the British
surface forces, together with the use of the French
bases and the co-operation of the French aircraft,
would enable the combined fleets to dominate a
sea area that we have previously decided that
the British forces could not command alone. That
question can be simplified down to an Anglo-
French surface superiority on the one hand
versus a great Italian advantage of position on the
other ; and what the answer would be, if the
112
OUR MEDITERRANEAN COMMUNICATIONS
Italians played their hand properly, it seems
injudicious to hazard.
French naval and air co-operation therefore
might or might not prove the turning-point in
the maintenance of our Mediterranean com-
munications. If it did not, then we should
perforce have to consider alternatives. If it did,
we may be fairly sure that it would only be
forthcoming at a price. What price we may be
prepared to pay for that co-operation will depend
on what importance we attach to the preservation
of the Mediterranean route for our shipping.
Ministers, and notably Mr. Eden, have frequently
referred to it as vital to our Imperial security.
Only a short time ago, a distinguished admiral, in
a letter to me, said that if we lost the use of the
Suez Canal it would be " good-bye to the Empire."
Was he right } Let us take a quick look round
the Empire. Canada obviously is quite indifferent
to the Suez route. South Africa ? The same
there. Australia and New Zealand ? The voyage
from London to Melbourne via the Cape is only
1,400 miles longer than by the Canal. In the
very difficult convoy conditions in the
Mediterranean that we have envisaged, a general
convoy delay of a fortnight for that section of
the route cannot be thought excessive ; which
at 12 knots means an addition of 4,000 miles to
the journey. The unconvoyed Cape route to
113
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Melbourne would therefore be virtually 2,500
miles shorter than the convoyed route via the
Canal. None of the Dominions therefore seems
to be affected seriously, if at all. In fact, for
Australia and New Zealand, it would seem actually
to pay us to discard the Mediterranean route in
the event of hostilities in that sea.
The cases of the Straits Settlements and India
are more difficult. The voyage to Bombay, for
instance, is increased from 6,000 odd miles by
Suez to 10,000 odd miles by the Cape, though if
we add the convoy delay in the Mediterranean
the difference becomes a good deal less. Of course,
were India to be attacked, succour would certainly
take a long time to reach her by the Cape. But
India has a very large garrison of her own, and
in any case it could hardly be threatened until
the Straits Settlements, and Singapore with them,
had been reduced ; and reinforcements from
England for Singapore would take so long to
arrive in any case that we may well ask w^hether
an adequate naval force on the spot is not the
only solution to that problem. That question is
considered in a later chapter. With these excep-
tions, the Suez route does not seem so really
vital to the Empire after all.
How would the interruption of our Mediter-
ranean communications affect our interests in the
Mediterranean itself ? Malta's concern will be
114
OUR MEDITERRANEAN COMMUNICATIONS
much more with ItaHan air attack than maritime
communications. Of Egypt there is no need to
say much. Its importance to us is bound up with
the Canal itself. Palestine ? The British people
would no doubt be reluctant to leave their
Palestinian experiment in the air ; but if the
Pantellaria channel should prove impassable, in
the air it would very largely have to be left, though
the Red Sea and Suez Canal offer a possible
alternative approach. The carriage of oil westward
from the Haifa pipe-line would also be cut short.
I have seen it authoritatively stated that the
value of this oil supply to the Navy is so great
that we must at all costs maintain a British fleet
in the Eastern Mediterranean to preserve it
inviolate ; and that for this purpose a new naval
base east of Malta, preferably in Cyprus, is
necessary in case the former place were to prove
untenable. Apart from the fact that the con-
struction of a new base would cost a good many
millions, we may usefully ask ourselves what is
the main purpose of the oil supply to the Navy's
oil-fired boilers. The answer is (and it has been
given many times by official spokesmen) that oil
firing for the Navy gives it greater speed, greater
endurance, and greater freedom of action than
coal or dual firing. But if the protection of
this oil supply demands the presence of the fleet
or a substantial portion of it in the Eastern
115
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Mediterranean, it follows that the very agent that
was to give the fleet its freedom has succeeded in
chaining it securely to the cul-de-sac of the
Levant. This is a contradictory position that
calls plainly for rectification.
Finally, there is the prestige question, beloved
particularly of the Foreign Office. If we were to
lose the use of the Mediterranean, would not our
prestige in the Near East and India and Africa be
seriously aflPected ? No doubt it would be affected,
but how seriously or how long is another matter.
The truth is that prestige is an elusive and
unpredictable benefit which is determined by
many factors, and by no means only by the
powder to sail ships through a particular area.
We abandoned the Mediterranean without visible
disaster in 1796, and if we suffered loss of prestige
it was partially repaired by two naval victories
outside the Mediterranean in 1797, St. Vincent
and Camperdown ; while it was not only fully
restored but brought to hitherto undreamt-of
heights by the return of Nelson's squadron to
the Mediterranean and his victory of the Nile in
1798. Loss of prestige was the one great argument
pressed against the evacuation of Gallipoli, but
no one would now claim that whatever we may
have lost in that respect could have justified
our further expenditure of life and money on
an unsuccessful enterprise. Prestige is indeed
116
OUR MEDITERRANEAN COMMUNICATIONS
an unstable counsellor and the nation that prefers
its guidance to that of the hard facts of its military
position will become a prey to vague and intangible
fears that may well lead it from one strategical
indiscretion to another.
Our survey of the Empire does not, in fact,
seem to confirm the foreboding that the severance
of our Mediterranean communications in a war
with Italy would bring the Imperial edifice
tumbling to the ground, and suggests that we are
justified in taking a reasonably matter-of-fact
view of the price we should be prepared to pay to
France for her help in keeping them intact. For
instance, were that price to involve the military
defence of the French frontier, we might well
conclude that it was too high. If so, then we
should frankly face the possibility that in a war
against Italy, we might not be able to keep the
Mediterranean route open, just as we could not
keep the Baltic route open in the last war. We
need not, however, allow that reflection unduly to
alarm us. For if ever two countries had every
reason to avoid coming to blows it is Italy and
ourselves. If she can hurt us by closing to us
the Suez route to the East, we can wound her
just as severely in return. With a naval force
working from Aden or Port Sudan we could cut
her communications with her new Colony of
Abyssinia. We could close both the Western
117
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
gate for her commerce at Gibraltar and the Eastern
gate at Aden. By so doing we could stifle her
oceanic trade. In the Mediterranean itself our
men-of-war and especially our submarines would
not be inactive ; while if our ships had the
use of the French ports, larger scale operations
could be undertaken in conjunction with the
French Navy that should make Italy exceedingly
uncomfortable in her own waters and should
sever her communications with Libya, while
leaving her East African possessions open to
attack from India. Such offensive operations
would only be possible if our naval forces were
freed from the encumbrance of defending or
trying to defend the British mercantile com-
munications to Suez.
Italy has far too much to lose from British
hostility to want to incur it lightly, and the fact
that both countries now have colonial com-
munications running through the Suez Canal
gives them an excellent reason for being friends
rather than enemies.
ii8
CHAPTER IX
OCEANIC COMMUNICATIONS
Finally, there are the deep sea routes which
traverse oceanic regions well clear of enemy or
friendly coastal air zones. With these may be
bracketed the coastal areas adjoining what will
probably be neutral territory, such as Brazil or
the Argentine. In these oceanic areas and
neutral coastal regions, surface and submarine
vessels will be the governing factors.
It is common to read in reports of official
utterances that this country needs so many
cruisers for the defence of its trade on the oceanic
routes, the large number required being due to
the great length of the Imperial communications.
The ordinary member of the public might well
conclude from such statements that trade defence
on these routes is a matter of cruisers only, and
patrolling cruisers at that. The claim that the
length of the communications determines the
number of ships necessary suggests that our
requirements in this respect are a matter of
linear measure ; that the trade routes would be
119
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
more or less divided up into sections, and that
in each section a cruiser would keep guard.
That conception of the problem, though it is
the natural deduction from the usual Admiralty
statements on the subject, cannot be the correct
one. For one of the clearest lessons of the war
was the ineffectiveness of the cruising or patrolling
system of protecting trade. The chase of such
ships as the Emden by patrolling cruisers became
a wild goose chase, with the patrolling ships
always one move behind in the game. The
superiority, both in protection value and in
economy of force, of convoy over patrolling was
demonstrated time after time and was finally
established beyond doubt during the German
submarine campaign.
A truer computation of the number of trade
protection cruisers required would go somewhat
as follows. It would first of all be necessary, in
the circumstances of any particular war, to decide
in what areas of the world convoy would be
necessary. In these areas, trade cruisers would
have to be allocated according to the number of
convoys to be dealt with, and not to the length of
the convoy route. In areas where convoy was
not in force, cruisers might not be necessary at
all ; or perhaps some might be kept ready there
in case convoy had to be extended to that region
at short notice. In either case, the number of
120
OCEANIC COMMUNICATIONS
cruisers required would necessarily vary to some
extent with the strength and vigour of the enemy
attack.
Can we, on this basis, make an accurate
calculation of the number of cruisers required.
The official figure of 70^ has been in force for a
good number of years. Admiral Sir Herbert
Richmond, in his recent book The Navy, has
placed the number at 86.^ It does not seem,
however, that anything more than a tentative
approximation is possible, since the cruiser force
required to be allocated to trade duty must
depend on who is the enemy, the naval strength
of that enemy at the moment, and the general
trade route policy ; such, for example, as whether
or not the Mediterranean is regarded as being
open, and for what areas convoy would be
probable. If the last war can give us any
guidance, we find that at the end of 191 7, there
were a little over 100 cruisers or similar vessels
on convoy escort duty or acting as police garrison
on distant stations.
It will be noted that the word " cruiser " has
so far been employed to indicate the type of
vessel that would be mainly required for trade
protection on the oceanic routes. This is in
^ Both these figures include an allowance for fleet cruisers,
which may be taken as being in the region of 20. The trade
element is therefore 50 and 66 respectively.
I 121
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
accordance with official usage, the term cruiser
being the one invariably used by the Admiralty
in connection with the general problem of oceanic
trade defence. In thus placing reliance on the
cruiser for the protection of commerce on the
High Seas, the official mind is no doubt dwelling
on tfie circumstances of the last war, in which
convoys were usually given an " ocean escort "
of a cruiser or an armed merchantman to accom-
pany them during their voyage. Can we be sure,
however, that this arrangement, even if it was
suitable in the last war, will be equally applicable
in the next ?
The use of cruisers or their equivalent for
ocean escort duty worked well enough in the last
war, but it has to be remembered that the system
was never challenged. It was a constant expecta-
tion on our part that the Germans would send a
battle cruiser out on to the trade routes to attack
shipping. Had they done so, the cruiser escorts
with the convoys must have proved broken reeds,
for they could not have stood up against the
attack. Cruisers, in fact, are only useful as pro-
tection against similar cruisers or smaller vessels.
Against larger cruisers or capital ships they could
offer no effective resistance. It has hitherto
always been the rule that, whatever the scale of
attack, the defence raust be on a corresponding
scale. That is to say, if battleship attack is to be
122
OCEANIC COMMUNICATIONS
anticipated, battleship defence must be provided.
That was certainly the procedure followed in
regard to the Scandinavian convoys in the last
war, where eventually divisions of battleships
formed the escort. The same procedure was
frequently followed in the old wars of the sailing
era, it being a common occurrence for line-of-
battleships to be included in the escorts given to
convoys.
It follows that a cruiser can only be regarded as
the proper escort for a convoy so long as nothing
larger than that cruiser attacks it. Can we be
certain that in the next war nothing more than
cruiser attack is to be apprehended on the ocean
trade routes ^ There is no reason why we should
allow ourselves to think so, or to dismiss the
possibility that a more serious form of attack may
be made. That possibility was certainly present
to the mind of the naval correspondent of the
Times when he recently wrote that. . .
*' Another form of departure from treaty limits
would be to build ' super-cruisers ' — ships
exceeding the 10,000 tons and 8-inch gun
limits of the treaty, but falling within the
* non-construction zone,' and thus not reaching
the size or cost of battleships. The super-
cruiser could play havoc with any convoy not
protected by a battleship. . . ."
123
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
If that can be said of " super-cruiser " attack, it
applies even more forcibly to attack by battle-
cruiser or battleship. Following the traditional
rule, therefore, we seem to be presented with
the possible necessity of providing battleship
escort for our oceanic trade in the next war, in
the same way as we often have in the past. But
while the necessity may be the same as on many
past occasions, the means of satisfying it have
unfortunately diminished. We have now only
15 capital ships all told, with another five to be
added when the existing programmes are com-
pleted. These capital ships are officially regarded
as the main citadel of our naval strength, and on
the supremacy of the battle fleet containing these
capital ships the fate of the Empire is held to
depend. How then can we possibly contemplate
disintegrating this battle fleet and scattering its
units over the trade routes of the world ? To do so
would be to invite its destruction in detail at the
hands of more concentrated bodies of enemy
ships. Even, however, if we were free thus to
disperse our capital ships on escort duty, their
number is quite inadequate for the purpose.
A world-wide trade of 7,000 ships is not to be
given protection by 15 or 20 units. Battleship
escort to trade is nowadays obviously impracticable
as a general strategical measure.
In that case, it may be asked, how was it a
124
OCEANIC COMMUNICATIONS
practicable undertaking in the old days ? The
answer is that the very much larger numbers of
battleships of former times made all the difference.
In the year of Trafalgar, for instance, British
line-of-battleships numbered 120, eight times as
many as we have now. This comfortable total
certainly left a reasonable margin over for trade
protection after the demands of the battle fleet
had been fully met. In the last war the number
had fallen to under half, Beatty having no more
than 46 capital ships (including the American
ships) at his disposal at the time of the inauguration
of the battleship escorts for the Scandinavian
convoys. The very much smaller number of
capital ships in 1917 compared with 1805 had
already begun to make our admirals restive about
detaching any of them for trade duty. Early in
191 8 we find Admiral Beatty complaining to the
Admiralty that he had not enough ships to protect
the Scandinavian convoys and fight the High
Seas Fleet at the same time. Now that the number
of our capital ships has still further declined to a
third of what Beatty had 21 years ago, the
difficulty of persuading a naval Commander-in-
Chief to relinquish any of his precious 15 for
trade escort duty will certainly have doubled.
What then can we do } Can we build up our
capital ship fleet to the numerical level of Nelsonian
days ; or even of Beatty's time ? There is not the
125
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
slightest chance of the former and very Httle of
the latter. With the unfortunate tendency of
capital ships to get more and more enormous,
till their cost has now reached the forbidding
figure of ;f 1 1,000,000 apiece, the possibility of
produpng them in large numbers has more or
less disappeared. The conclusion therefore seems
unavoidable, that while there is nothing to stop
a possible enemy sending off one or more of his
capital ships to raid our shipping on the ocean
trade routes, it has become virtually impossible for
us to utilise our own capital ships in order to
protect them.
Does this mean that our trade on the oceanic
routes cannot be protected ? It is no use expecting
a convoy cruiser to stand up to a raiding battle-
cruiser or battleship. And if our own battleships
or battle-cruisers cannot be there to do it, must
we therefore conclude that the use of enemy
capital ships in the direct attack on our trade is
bound to cut it to pieces ? Not necessarily ; but
it does mean that we shall have to devise new
means of protecting it.
In devising these means, can we not make use
of that moral factor which we have already
observed to have exerted such a powerful influence
on the actions of our own big ships in the last war ?
We have noticed the very great dread felt by
the capital ship for the submarine. We might
126
OCEANIC COMMUNICATIONS
therefore utilise that dread for our own pur-
poses. If we cannot provide a battleship for each
convoy, there is nothing to prevent us providing
two or three submarines. If it were known that
our convoys were liable to have submarines
stationed a couple of miles or so away on one or
two likely bearings of enemy approach, a raiding
battleship or large cruiser would have the uncom-
fortable knowledge that in order to attack the
convoy it must automatically bring itself within
close reach of submarine attack. It will be strange
if that knowledge is without its effect on the big
and valuable attacker, and on the authorities that
may be wondering whether to expose it to the risk.
With this possibility in mind of utilising moral
effect, let us make a re-survey of the problem of
the protection of a convoy. Attack on oceanic
convoys may be of three kinds ; surface, sub-
marine, or air. Against submarine attack, a
number of small craft are the best protection.
That was proved clearly by the last war and need
not be re-argued. Surface attack may be either by
large or small ships. Against large-ship attack, we
have argued that submarine escort might prove a
useful deterrent ; in which case it should be
noted that the larger the attacking ship, the greater
the deterrent effect of the submarine must be.
This deterrent effect could be intensified by the
additional use of aircraft. These could be carried
127
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
with a convoy either in an aircraft carrier, or in the
ships of the escort, or in the ships of the convoy
themselves. Carriers being even more scarce
than capital ships, only a very small fraction of
convoys could be given carrier escort. Aircraft
could be carried easily enough in one or more of
the ships of the escort, but it would mean that
they would have to be cruisers at least, it being
not yet practicable for aircraft to be carried in
destroyers or sloops. Alternatively, a certain
number of merchant ships on any particular run
might be fitted with an aircraft and catapult on the
poop or elsewhere in the ship, the routeing
organisation being so arranged that every convoy
contained one or more of such ships. Torpedo-
bomber attack on a raiding big ship could thus be
added to submarine and perhaps surface torpedo
attack.
Against small-ship attack, either by light
cruiser, destroyer or sloop, the deterrent effect of
submarine and aircraft will be small. This form
of attack calls for surface defence and the choice
might well lie between a cruiser and three or four
destroyers or sloops. As between our present
destroyers and sloops, the decision must go to the
destroyers, for they are not only the better gun-
vessels, but they also carry the torpedoes that
would be useful in the event of big-ship attack.
The fact is our sloops are neither one thing nor the
128
OCEANIC COMMUNICATIONS
Other. Most of them are too weak to engage a des-
troyer and almost too slow to deal with a submarine,
while to a raiding cruiser or bigger ship they would
present little trouble. Destroyers, on the other
hand, being fast and armed with torpedoes, could
not be ignored by a raider of whatever size, while
in combinations of three or more they might well
be a match for a single cruiser.
Air attack on an oceanic convoy must come
either from carrier aircraft or those few carried
by a raiding cruiser. Defence by gunfire, so far
as it might be effective, calls for a number of anti-
aircraft gun-vessels stationed round a convoy, so
as to cover the principal directions of aircraft
approach, the object being to keep aircraft high,
even if they could not be kept off altogether. One
single convoy cruiser would leave too many
vulnerable points unguarded. This numerical
inadequacy of cruisers applies particularly to the
three or four special anti-aircraft cruisers into
which our older cruisers are being converted.
Valuable as these ships might be for the protection
of convoys, they are far too few in number to be a
serious factor in oceanic trade defence. Nor is the
anti-aircraft arming of the merchant ships them-
selves likely to be of much value, for anti-aircraft
gunnery is the most difficult form of the ballistic
art. The best chance seems to lie with the fire
from small-ship escorts.
129
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Counter-attack by aircraft is a possibility, and
here again, catapult aircraft installed in the
merchant ships themselves would appear the best
combination, for the same general reasons as
those advanced on page 128.
Suijnming up, we get the following results for
the most promising forms of defence of oceanic
convoys. Against attack by capital ship and large
cruisers, submarines and aircraft carried in some
of the ships of the convoy, together with torpedoes
in the surface escort. Against light surface-craft
attack, an escort of three or four destroyers.
Against submarines, six or more destroyers or
sloops. Against ship-borne aircraft, anti-aircraft
fire from at least three escorts, and merchant-ship
aircraft. Balancing up these demands we arrive at
the final conclusion of submarines, aircraft in
ships of the convoy, and three or four destroyers,
with an addition to the anti-submarine escort
when passing through specially dangerous waters.
I use the term " sloop " rather than the title
" escort vessel " recently coined by the Admiralty.
The latter, as a description of the sloop class,
seems singularly maladroit ; for escort vessels are
in fact liable to be anything from battleships to
submarines. To bestow the function name on one
out of six or seven classes of ship liable to do the
duty seems unnecessarily confusing.
130
CHAPTER X
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
The examination that we have just completed of
the forms that the control of the sea highways in
the next war is likely to take seems to produce
certain inferences regarding the proper types of
warship required to exercise that control. Of
these inferences, none seems more unmistakable
than that concerning the great ships. In our
survey of invasion, of trade defence, of submarine
and aerial warfare, we have been constantly noting
the diminished importance of the large, heavily-
gunned, heavily-armoured capital ship. In defence
against invasion, it is now faced with the com-
petition of submarines, aircraft and torpedo craft.
It is very doubtful if it will ever again act in close
support of an invasion, on account of the great
risks to itself from mines, submarines, aircraft and
surface torpedo craft that such support must
involve. In defence of trade, either in Home
waters, in the Mediterranean, or in more open
waters, we have seen that it appears unlikely to
play any direct part.
131
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
The causes of its limited and diminishing utility
are not far to seek. They lie in the modern capital
ship's great size and therefore enormous cost.
Battleships that have reached the tonnage of
40,000 and have come to cost over ^(J 10,000,000
eachjhave become so expensive that the nations
can afford to possess a very few of them only. The
more scarce and costly they are, however, the
more valuable they will appear in the estimation
of their possessors, and the greater disinclina-
tion there will be to expose them to avoidable
risk. If the responsible authorities believe that the
security of the Empire resides in fifteen battle
units it would not be surprising that they should
weigh very carefully every hazard to which those
fifteen precious units may be subjected. The
result is an increasing tendency to think more of
preserving the great ship from damage than of
using her to damage the enemy. A study of Naval
Estimate speeches of recent years reveals an official
attitude towards the battleship that is concerned
chiefly for her safety ; an attitude that expresses
itself in the questions — can she stand up to the
heavy shell ; to the air bomb ; to the torpedo ?
Moreover, this attitude of defensive solicitude is
undoubtedly driving its roots farther and farther
into the naval soil. A recent paper on the functions
of the battleship by a naval Lieutenant-Com-
mander published in the Journal of the Royal
132
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
United Service Institution opened with these
significant words :
" T\iQ first essential^ of the battleship is that
it shall be able to withstand all forms of attack,
whether from the sea, the air, or the land."
There is only too much reason to fear that there
is a growing tendency to think of the battleship
in terms of '* can we keep her safe ? " rather than
of " can she sink the enemy ? "
This preservative attitude of mind towards the
great ship is further exemplified in the very heavy
overhead charges now attaching to the battleship
in the shape of the various kinds of protective
vessels with which it is increasingly surrounding
itself. Modern battleships will not venture to sea
without a crowd of destroyers to shield them from
the submarine, without anti-aircraft cruisers to
shield them from the airplane, without cruisers
to guard them from the destroyer, without aircraft
carriers to furnish it with fighter patrols. All
this auxiliary tonnage presents a formidable
proportion of the total battle-strength. Our
present fifteen capital ships, aggregating 480,000
tons, would probably require an auxiliary array
of fifteen cruisers, fifty destroyers, four anti-
aircraft cruisers and three carriers, totalling
280,000 tons. This proportion of 37 per cent.
'My italics.
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
auxiliary to 63 per cent, of capital ship tonnage
may be compared with the 8 and 92 per cent, of
frigate and line-of-battle ship tonnage with which
Nelson sailed into action at Trafalgar. We noted
in Chapter II the very marked tendency that
existed in the last war to preserve our battleships
from damage, though we possessed a comfortable
superiority in them. With the acceptance since
the war of the one-power standard, the consider-
able decline in numbers from those of the last
war, and the emergence of a new hazard in the
shape of the air menace, the tendency to nurse
them is unlikely to have grown any weaker.
The curious thing is that these great ships
which more and more thought is being given to
guard from harm are still spoken of as the most
powerful and indispensable fighting ships afloat.
Yet by this and most other tests, their ancient
supremacy seems to be no longer what it was ;
for there are at least two classes of war vessel,
the submarine and the airplane, that are more
of a menace to the great ship than the great
ship is to them. Why then do we continue to
profess such unswerving faith in the big ship's
dominance ? An answer often given is that since
every other important naval power is also con-
vinced of the value of the large capital ship our
own Admiralty's adherence to the same doctrine
receives ample confirmation. But if the main
134
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
justification for the British Admiralty's faith in
40,000-ton battleships is that the American,
Japanese, German, French and Italian Admiralties
profess the same faith, how can we be sure that,
for instance, the American policy is not deter-
mined by the apparent conviction of the British,
French, Italian, German and Japanese : and so
on round the circle ? The game of follow-my-
leader is no new one in naval policy, as is shown
by this extract from the report of our own Com-
mittee on the Design of Warships, which sat in
1871 :
'* a simple and perhaps, under ordinary circum-
stances, a safe method by which the require-
ments of the British Navy may from time to
time be estimated, is to watch carefully the
progress of other nations in designing and
constructing ships of war, and to take care
that our own fleet shall be more than equal
both in number and power of its ships to that
actually at the disposal of any other nation."^
The fact that all the maritime nations are
building huge ships does not alter the fact that
their utility has been steadily declining. They can
at the present time take very little part in the
defence of trade or the protection of overseas
military expeditions by reason partly of their
1 My italics.
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
great vulnerability to underwater attack and
partly of the extreme fewness of their number,
due to their prohibitive cost. Their function has
practically been reduced to that of watching the
movements of the corresponding great ships of
an enemy and bringing them to action if they
offer* an opportunity for doing so.
In view of this severe limitation on their value,
the question must arise whether this their last
remaining function of fighting the opposing battle
fleet could not also be taken over by the smaller
vessels on which all the other functions of the
battleships seem now to have devolved. If they
could, the final justification for the construction
of the great ships will have dissolved. In short,
cannot small size and large numbers form an
efficient substitute for large size and small
numbers ? In examining this possibility, do not
let us make the mistake of thinking that the
question at issue is the abolition of the battleship.
As is often and very truly said, the battleship
is an indispensable instrument of naval power.
Yes, but the point is, what size of battleship ?
The battleship is but the largest class of surface
warship that a country possesses, provided it can
out-fight the average merchant ship and keep the
seas in all weathers. So long as it can satisfy these
conditions, a warship is as much a battleship if it
is of fifteen hundred tons as of forty-five thousand.
136
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
Let US therefore examine the possibility of
substituting much smaller vessels for the present
great ship for battle as well as for other purposes.
First of all, how much smaller vessels shall we
consider ? Shall we take lesser battleships of, say,
25,000 tons, or armoured ships of 10,000 tons, or
something smaller even than that ? There are
two reasons for going as low as possible on the
scale. The first is that it is the smallest ocean-
going vessels of all that have been increasing
in importance for control purposes ; for defence
of trade and for defence against invasion. The
second is that the present-day unhealthy regard
for the protection and security of the great ship
comes from its comparative scarcity. Battleships
are now so valuable that the loss of even one of
them (e.g.y Audacious) is regarded as a disaster
that must be concealed at all costs. The con-
sequence is that considerations of their armour
protection and general preservation from harm
come to occupy excessive attention. The proper
fighting frame of mind is unlikely to be recovered
until the question of " protecting " a fighting
ship has ceased to be a matter of great concern ;
and that can hardly occur until on the one hand
fighting ships have become so small that serious
armouring is impracticable, and on the other
hand that they have become so numerous that
possible losses among them can be regarded
K 137
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
as part of the natural and not very grievous
concomitant of battle. These considerations point
to the destroyer or small cruiser (the same thing)
as the first object of our investigation. We may
therefore select the destroyer class for our test,
this being about the smallest class that embodies
the qualities postulated above.
The new 40,000-ton battleships we are under-
stood to be on the point of laying down are stated
to cost ;(] 1 1,000,000 each. This capital outlay is
represented by an annual interest charge (at 3 per
cent.) of ;£330,ooo a year. There are no annual
upkeep figures available for such ships yet, to
include such items as the pay of the crew, refit
costs, fuel, upkeep and maintenance charges.
Thirteen years ago, the corresponding figures for
the 35,000-ton Rodney were stated in Parliament^
to be j(]43 0,000 annually. Allowing for the one-
seventh larger size of the new ships we get
^£490, coo for them. The total cost of a 40,000-ton
battleship is therefore represented by an annual
charge of ;£82o,ooo.
The modern destroyer, on the other hand, costs
3^320,000 to build, which again is represented by
an annual charge of ,£9,000. I have been unable
to find official figures for its annual maintenance
charges, but Janets Fighting Ships gives the
sum of ^£41,000 for the destroyers of the E class
^Hansard for August 5th, 1925.
138
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
which were first commissioned in 1935. The
cost of one destroyer to the country may therefore
be given as ^(^50,000 per annum. It follows,
therefore, that we could have 16 destroyers for
the same financial outlay as one battleship of
40,000 tons. For a fleet of, say, ten such battle-
ships, therefore, a number that we are quite
likely to be building in the next decade, we
could instead have a mass of 160 destroyers.
The comparison would not, of course, be between
160 destroyers and 10 battleships, because the
battleships would infallibly have an auxiliary
fleet of, say, 12 cruisers, 40 destroyers, four
anti-aircraft cruisers and two or three carriers
with them for general protective purposes. We
must therefore add a corresponding equivalent
force of destroyers. This would mean about 115
additional ships. The final comparison would
therefore be between a mixed force of 10 battle-
ships, with cruisers and destroyers, and a body
of 275 destroyers, or 260 odd if we give the
latter a couple of carriers of their own.
What sort of chance would the cloud of smaller
vessels have against the much fewer number of
greatly larger ones ? If the smaller ones were
handled with skill and with due regard to the
tactics most suitable to their own particular
powers and characteristics they should present a
very awkward problem for the battleships.
139
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Though battleships can now be given high speed,
it can be taken that small and light vessels such
as destroyers can generally be given a higher
one, and they will besides be handier and quicker
to gain their speed than the great ships. The
light craft should also be able to make valuable
use of the tactical adjunct of funnel smoke, an
expedient that, though it is difficult to utilise
with advantage in the heavy-gun duel and has
therefore received only meagre consideration in
our own fleet, ought to be capable of considerable
exploitation in connection with high-speed torpedo
attack. That such a possibility has not escaped
the notice of foreigners is shown by this extract
from a letter written to the Daily Telegraph by a
Frenchman, M. Gautreau, who spoke of " our
30-odd super-destroyers of 2,400-3,000 tons and
36 to 45 knots speed, for the utilisation of which
special tactics have been successfully elaborated.
Let it be sufficient to say that in these times of
artificial clouds and limited visibility, without
speaking of night warfare, projectile-like vessels
propelled at over 40 knots and ready to launch
salvos of six or eight torpedoes of 22 in. diameter,
might make their meeting disastrous for the
largest and best-protected target."
It is clear, in fact, that a reliance on small ships
instead of big ones would demand the working
out of tactical methods appropriate to their small
140
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
size ; and these methods would not necessarily
be those of our present-day flotillas. The latter's
tactical technique has not been allowed to develop
independently, but has for years been sub-
ordinated to the requirements of the battleships'
gun duel. Destroyers have not been able to
attack when it suited them best as destroyers,
but when the battleships wanted them to. How
cramped and subservient has been their role is
well illustrated by Jellicoe's handling of his
destroyers on the night of Jutland. Every con-
sideration of destroyer tactics called for their
being sent out to find and attack the High Seas
Fleet during the dark hours. Instead, Jellicoe
tied them to the rear of his own battleships,
presumably to afford the latter extra protection
from enemy destroyer attack.
Let us therefore picture an encounter between
a fleet of 260 odd destroyers and the composite
force of battleships, cruisers and destroyers that
would be its financial equivalent. One part of
the destroyer fleet might be told oflP to deal with
the cruisers and destroyers of the enemy. There
are many destroyer officers who would cheerfully
engage one cruiser with a division of four
destroyers. The 12 cruisers and 40 destroyers
of the orthodox fleet would therefore require the
attention of 1 00 of the destroyers of the unortho-
dox. This would leave 160 to deal exclusively
141
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
with the battleships, in which they could rely
on their high speed, on their large numbers
making it difficult for the battleships to fire at
more than a few of them at a time, and on the use
of smoke.
Alternatively, they might hold off at long
range during the day with a view to exploiting
the destroyer's greatest friend, the darkness of
the night. The battleship admiral who found
that the dense masses of enemy torpedo craft
were keeping at arm's-length and refusing action
during the day would hardly anticipate the
approach of night without serious misgiving.
Still more anxious would he be likely to feel if
the enemy had spent the daylight hours picking
off, by virtue of their greatly superior numbers,
his own destroyers and cruisers, who if they were
to guard him effectively would have to be disposed
as outposts some miles away from the capital
ships. To see his scarce and costly battleships
being gradually denuded of those protecting light
craft on which the great ships have come so
heavily to rely must increase the anxieties of the
battleship admiral twenty-fold, and might very
easily induce him to abandon his enterprise and
return to harbour.
It seems, in fact, that a reversion to small size
and large numbers would open up possibilities
of the use of skill and ingenuity in naval tactics
142
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
that has largely departed from the present-day
slogging match of the great battleships. Certain
it is that Jellicoe's tactical policy in the last war
was one in which anything in the nature of tactical
finesse was reduced almost to vanishing point.
He had decided that if the enemy turned away
he would not follow. He had announced that
he was opposed to action on opposite courses,
that he would not stand up to enemy destroyer
attacks, and that he would avoid a night action.
He would, in fact, only fight in daylight, and
only then if the enemy would obligingly steam
along on a parallel course at a convenient range
and allow himself to be destroyed by superior
gun-power, without making any endeavour to
redress the balance by the use of underwater
weapons. The tactical conception was that of
the battering-ram only and it credited the enemy
with neither intelligence nor even the ordinary
instincts of self-preservation.
It might perhaps be argued that even to con-
template the use of delaying tactics for the small
ships such as have been envisaged here would
be to disregard the Nelsonian tradition of close
action as rapidly as possible. It would be a
mistake, however, to regard Nelson as the
advocate of mere blind attack. We should remem-
ber that two out of three of his victories were
fought at anchor, and that his tactics at Trafalgar
143
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
were based on a belief in the Allied Fleet's
inefficiency and on a conviction that to close
with a Frenchman was the way to beat him.
That his mind was far from shut to the subtleties
of skilful tactics can be seen from his well-known
dictum, " Close with a Frenchman, but out-
manoeuvre a Russian." Even against a French-
man the immediate mel^e was not always his aim.
" Do not be surprised," he said to his captains
during the chase after Villeneuve from the West
Indies, " if I do not fall upon them immediately.
We won't part without a fight."
We have, moreover, in this matter the example
of another great sea warrior, Sir Francis Drake.
The tactics employed by the British Fleet against
the Spanish Armada were almost exactly those
implicit in Nelson's last-quoted intention of
selecting the right moment and the right manner
to attack. The British ships in 1588 were generally
smaller and less well-manned than the Spanish.
Howard and Drake did not therefore rush in-
to close action. They held off on the outskirts
and maintained a harassing action with the
Armada during its passage up the Channel.
Then when it had anchored at Calais, they
launched the equivalent of the night destro3^er
attack — they sent in the fireships. And the moral
effect of that attack was too much for the
Spaniards. They cut their cables and fled.
144
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
It therefore seems by no means impossible to
regard a large number of small ships, provided
they employ tactics appropriate to their kind, as
capable of successfully giving battle to a small
number of large ones. And if so, it must follow
that it is within the power of the destroyer,
which has already usurped more than one of
the functions formerly held by the battleship,
to perform also the latter's last remaining one
of giving battle to the enemy's battle fleet. And
that is speaking of the battle between the surface
forces only, without counting possible air partici-
pation. If we introduce aircraft into the battle,
whether as shore-based or as carrier aircraft, the
destroyer fleet's chances would even be improved.
While the large, few and unwieldy battleships
form good aircraft targets, the numerous, small,
and very swift and handy destroyers present
comparatively poor ones. The smallness of the
individual destroyer target and the embarrassing
multiplicity of those targets from the point of
view of the attacking airman constitute in fact
the destroyer's best defence against air attack.
That being so, the task of any carrier aircraft
that might be at the disposal of the destroyer
admiral would be greatly simplified ; for he
would need to waste no thought on the defence
of his own surface craft, but could devote his
whole energies to the attack on the enemy's.
145
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
In thus marshalling the relative merits of the
small and large ships, it has not been forgotten
that bad weather hampers the small ship more
than the big one. It takes, however, more than
usually bad weather to embarrass the modern
destroyer ; besides which, bad weather does not
last indefinitely, and it would be open to a
destroyer fleet to hold off till it moderated.
Whatever may be said by the upholders of
large battleships in their favour, it is difficult to
know what active part they are likely to play in a
war against either Germany or Italy. Germany
having accepted the one-third ratio with us, it
is hard to see what else our own battleships
would do in a German war but sit in harbour
and wait for some movement by the German
battleships which would probably have no inten-
tion of making any movement at all. Against
Italy, as we have seen in our consideration of
trade defence in the Mediterranean in Chapter
VIII, the battleship's scope would be almost
equally circumscribed. Indeed, it v^as an open
secret among the officers of the Mediterranean
Fleet during the Abyssinian crisis that the
question that our Commander-in-Chief found the
most puzzling was what to do with his capital
ships.
The adoption of small and light ships of the
general characteristics of destroyers as the battle-
146
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
ships of the Navy, in place of the present huge,
heavily-gunned, heavily-armoured leviathans,
would have a number of important advantages.
It would almost eliminate the menace of sub-
marine and destroyer attack which loomed so
large in the minds of battleship admirals in the
last war. The destroyer has naturally no particular
reason to fear its fellow-destroyer and it knows
that the submarine would rather avoid than
attack it. In the same way, the air menace that
looms almost as largely in the minds of our
present-day battleship admirals would be greatly
reduced, by reason of the exceedingly unpromising
nature of the new target.
The problem of naval bases would also be very
considerably eased. As explained in a previous
chapter, no admiral will willingly use a base open
to constant air attack by enemy shore-based air-
craft. Especially reluctant will he be to expose
his few and valuable capital ships to such attack.
As the range of aircraft increases, therefore, there
will be a natural desire to seek naval bases farther
and farther away from enemy territory. Such a
process has, however, its limitations ; for unless
a fleet base is reasonably close to the area in which
the fleet will have to operate, the latter cannot do
its work in that area. It may be doubted whether
that limitation was fully present to the mind of
Sir Samuel Hoare when he touched on the
147
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
question of bases in introducing the 1937 Naval
Estimates. " While certain bases," he said,
*' are more convenient to the fleet than other
bases, there is no single base that is absolutely
indispensable, and if the worst came to the worst,
we could transfer our operations from one base
to one of the many other bases in which this
country and the Empire are so rich." The
implication seems clear enough. If the fleet could
not stay in England, it could go to Scotland. If
Scotland became bombable, it would go on to
Ireland, and then, shall we say, to Bermuda.
No doubt it would be safe enough at Bermuda,
but from there it would afford no protection
whatever to the British Isles. I am sorry to keep
on tilting at Sir Samuel Hoare, but I fear his
solution to the naval base problem is altogether
too facile.
The fact is that the point has practically been
reached already when warships cannot enjoy
immunity from air attack in their bases if they are
to perform their proper functions ; in which
case they will be faced with the alternative
of admitting that they can no longer discharge
those functions, or of finding some way of
discounting the air menace to fleets in harbour.
A reliance on small ships instead of big ones
would unquestionably contribute towards the
satisfactory solution of this dilemma. The possi-
148
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
bility of air attack doing decisive damage to a
fleet in harbour becomes progressively less with
the decrease in the size of the ship and the increase
in its numbers. It also becomes less in proportion
to the number of bases in use. That again is
where the small ship has the advantage. It was
all very well for Sir Samuel Hoare to talk about
the country being so rich in naval bases. So it is,
but not in big ship bases. Not only in Britain
but in the world, the problem of bases suitable
for present-day battleships is known by every
naval officer to be a very difficult one, by reason
of the great size and deep draught of the ships.
Against Germany, there are only three practicable
big ship bases : Rosyth, Cromarty and Scapa,
all a long way north. A destroyer fleet could use
these and many others as well, and could come
much farther south ; to the Tyne, the Humber,
Harwich, the Medway, and Dover.
Perhaps, however, the most beneficial result of
a drastic reduction in size and increase in numbers
would be the freeing of the naval officer's mind
from thoughts of protection and the avoidance
of damage. Since the first iron plate was screwed
on to the side of one of our old wooden walls,
naval officers have been increasingly concerned
with armour and other protection for their ships.
The notion of a " balanced ship " is nowadays
one in which off"ence and protection are nicely
149
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
adjusted. When ships are so small, however,
that the enemy's shells cannot be kept out, it
becomes possible to think of a " balance " in
terms of weapons. The larger the ship, the
greater the influence of the underwater and
aerial weapons relative to the gun, and vice versa.
Large i\umbers of small craft would be needed
to wrest the sovereignty away from the great
ship. Once that issue had been settled, and all
nations had reduced their battleships down to
the size of destroyers, the gun would rise in
importance and there would then be a natural
tendency for it to increase in size and carry
the ship with it on the upward trend again. This
process would go on until a true *' balance "
had been struck between the gun and the other
weapons ; which should occur when ships had
so increased in size and scarcity as just to induce
doubts about exposing them to underwater and
air attack. This balance I should judge to be
reached somewhere about the 3,000-ton mark.
Any increase by one nation above the " balance "
mark (at whatever tonnage it might be) would
make it worth its rival's while to decrease size
with an accompanying increase of numbers.
The balance between oflFence and defence, on
the other hand, leads to great size, and great size
leads to a cautious attitude of mind. It is not
difficult to picture the change that would come
150
THE FUTURE OF THE BIG SHIP
over the mentality of our generals if their army
consisted of 15 men, replaceable only after two
or three years. That army analogy may indeed
be a useful one. The increase in weapon power
on land has destroyed the value of the old mass-
attack and has caused the mass to be broken up
into many fragments. May not the increase of
weapon power at sea demand the same thing ?
Are we, in fact, making the same mistake that
we made in 19 17 } Faced with the novelty of the
unrestricted submarine campaign against com-
merce, we sought to defeat that campaign by the
weight of material output. It was by means of
more guns, more depth charges, more air bombs,
more indicator nets, more patrol vessels, more
motor boats ; it was by a great multiplication of
material resources that we tried to frustrate the
German endeavour. And yet all the many,
many millions we spent in these ways were spent
unnecessarily, for all that was really wanted was
an idea costing nothing — the introduction of
convoy. Faced now with another novel problem,
the greatly-increased menace of the air, super-
imposed on the existing menaces of the submarine
and the destroyer and the minelayer, we are again
trying to meet it by increased industrial output ;
by more anti-aircraft guns, by special anti-
aircraft cruisers, by horizontal armour, bigger
battleships ; none of which the country is receiving
151
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
as free gifts. The general similarity to 1917
in the way we are meeting this new menace
provokes the query whether we are not falling
into the same general error in incurring once
more great (and needless) expenditure on lavish
material equipment, when all that is required
is a change of system in the shape of a drastic
reduction in the size of ships.
There is one final point to consider in con-
nection with this question of size. If the destroyer
policy is the right one, other nations would
presumably follow us in adopting it ; and in
that case, should we be any better off ? The
answer must be, yes. The smaller ships are, the
more quickly they can be built and in greater
numbers. At a pinch destroyers can be turned
out in six months. Battleships take much longer
and the number of yards where they can be built
are much fewer. A small ship policy makes
possible, therefore, a much more rapid naval
expansion in times of war or emergency than a
policy based on 40,000-ton battleships. And since
our shipbuilding resources are the greatest in
the world, a small ship policy should enable us
to extract the maximum benefit from our advantage
in that respect.
152
CHAPTER XI
THE MERCHANT FLEET
For many years past this country has seen fit to
follow an industrial economic policy that has
resulted in the country being dependent on
imported supplies of food and raw materials. This
policy may add to the wealth of the nation, but
it has certain grave disadvantages in wartime
in that the stream of overseas trade on which the
physical and industrial feeding of the country
depends forms a highly-vulnerable element which
demands constant and careful protection.
In the last war the German submarine attack
on our commerce brought this point home to us
very forcibly, for the shipping losses were such
as to cause the authorities the greatest anxiety
for the maintenance of our supplies. At that
time we owned over 40 per cent, of the world's
shipping. Moreover, the fact that the merchant
tonnage of the world was almost wholly coal-fired
enabled us to press no small amount of neutral
tonnage into our service through our ability to
apply bunker control.
L 153
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Since the war, as is widely known, the problem
of supplying this country has become steadily
more difficult. British cargo tonnage (exclusive
of tankers) has declined by 3,500,000 tons and
the number of such ships by 2,000. The British
percentage of the world's shipping has declined
from the 44 per cent, of 1914 to 28 per cent.
now. At the same time as the means of supply
have been diminishing, the demands on that
supply have been growing. A million acres
of our agricultural land have been given over
to the builder and the roadmaker, and another
million have gone out of cultivation. Meanwhile,
the population that requires feeding has gone
up by four millions. In addition, the increasing
use of oil as a propellent at sea has seriously
reduced our power of recruiting the aid of neutral
tonnage through the agency of bunker control.
What is even worse, the conversion of half our
own merchant tonnage to oil-firing has put
that part of our own merchant fleet within the
reach of the foreign bunker controller. Let us
also remember that our naval strength has been
cut down drastically since the Armistice, and
that the small craft available for escorting convoys
are now about 200 below what were found
necessary in the last war.
The supply situation has now, therefore, the
154
THE MERCHANT FLEET
appearance of being not merely worse but very
much worse than in 19 14, and in view of the
straits to which we were reduced in the last war,
seems to invite conjecture as to the sanity of the
nation and of its rulers. A nation that allows
itself to become completely dependent for its
very life on imported supplies may or may not be
putting bank balances before security. A nation
that having accepted that position of dependence
does not take good care to have enough shipping
of its own to bring in those supplies might be
thought at first sight to be qualifying for certifica-
tion.
But is the situation really as bad as it seems ?
There are no doubt arguments to be advanced
for the contrary view. One of these is that while
our 1 914 cargo tonnage was admittedly larger
than it is now, it was also larger than we needed
for our own supplies, since we were then the
carriers for the world to a much greater extent
than now. While, therefore, our world-carrying
capacity has declined, it may be held that our
capacity for supplying the British Isles remains
adequate. The weak point of that argument
would seem to lie in the great anxiety that arose
regarding merchant ship tonnage during the
German submarine campaign. Although our
mercantile marine may have been much larger
155
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
in 1 91 3 than we needed for the maintenance of
our own home siippHes, it did not prove to be
superabundant under the stress of wartime
losses.
Another argument is that, admitting that British
cargo shipping has decreased in favour of foreign
tonnage, economic considerations can be rehed
on to ensure that much of that foreign tonnage
will be at our disposal in the event of war ; for
the simple reason that if it refused to serve the
British market, it would have no alternative
markets available. This may possibly be true.
Nevertheless, the argument seems to ignore the
possibility of political action. One of the most
powerful weapons we possess in war is our
ability to prevent neutral supplies reaching enemy
countries, by virtue of our superior sea power.
The more, however, we ourselves come to rely
on neutral shipping for our own supplies, obviously
the less will these same neutrals be inclined to
put up with our contraband control, a control
to which they have always strongly objected in
the past. There is good reason to think, therefore,
that any appreciable dependence on neutral ship-
ping in war can only be enjoyed at the expense
of economic pressure on the enemy.
A third argument lies in the safeguard of
storage. Now it is essential to distinguish betv/een
156
THE MERCHANT FLEET
Storage as a substitute for merchant tonnage and
storage as an insurance against temporary trade
dislocation due to the unpredictable effects of
large-scale air attack. Against the possibility of
such dislocation it is perhaps wise to make
provision, and it is on those grounds that the
Government has already accumulated certain
supplies. In the recent words of the Prime
Minister, ** We must provide against the dis-
location which would occur, or might occur, after
an air attack. We require to keep certain reserves
to enable us to tide over that first emergency
period. Those reserves have already been laid
in." Apart from this the Prime Minister went
on to say we should " rely on the Navy and
the Mercantile Marine to keep open our trade
routes and to enable us to import our food and
raw materials indefinitely."
That is undoubtedly the correct policy to
follow. This country does not need to store food,
oil, or other supplies unless there is a possibility
of the supplies failing to arrive. But if the supplies
do fail, it will be because there are insufficient
ships to carry them. So long, therefore, as there
is any possibility of the failure of supplies, the
soundest policy must be to spend whatever
money is available in building more ships ;
whether more merchant shipping, or more naval
157
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
tonnage, or both, as the principal need may be.
To spend money on storage is to have so much
the less money for ships and is thereby to increase
the very danger against which storage is supposed
to be a safeguard. In addition to these concrete
defects, storage for anything more than temporary
dislocation inculcates a defensive attitude of mind
towards the supply problem, the only true
solution of which will be reached by the exertion
of our merchant ships and of the men-of-war
who must fight to protect them. It is all very
well to argue, as some people do, that because
Germany has gone in for storage we should do
the same. The two cases are entirely dissimilar.
Storage may be a sound enough measure for a
country that must expect to lose the command
at sea in war. Our own country cannot afford to
contemplate the loss of that command, and is
therefore on dangerous ground if it even considers
storage as an alternative to the maintenance of
sea-borne supplies.
It is clear, however, that the Government does
not intend to rely on storage rather than ships.
But if not, we seem to be back at our original
difficulty that the merchant tonnage at our dis-
posal has every appearance of being inadequate
for our wartime needs. And what is worse, even
that tonnage cannot be kept in service in the
158
THE MERCHANT FLEET
face of foreign subsidisation. Owing to this
subsidisation and to declining trade, our shippers
are even now laying up many of their ships.
Does this laying up matter ? It may be argued
that laid-up ships are still available in wartime.
So they may be. But what of their crews ? If
ships are laid up for any length of time, the
personnel tends naturally to drift off to other
employment, from which it may not be detachable
when seamen are again wanted. The number
of our merchant seamen in employment is now
4,500 less than in 1914, and it is known that
during the increased shipping activity of the
last two or three years great difficulty has often
been experienced at the ports in getting men.
Serious fluctuations in the mercantile tonnage in
use are therefore bound to produce difficulties
in the manning question, even if not in the ships
themselves.
The shipping situation seems in fact to have
got into a dangerous tangle. One cannot, of
course, blame the owners for laying up ships
or for paying sole regard to their own profit and
loss accounts. It is no part of their duty to
consider whether the aggregate of British mer-
cantile tonnage is adequate for the needs of the
country under war conditions. But it is most
definitely the Government's duty, and as a first
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SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Step towards straightening the tangle out, let us
at least have a Minister of Marine with the
undivided duty of looking after one of the greatest
of our national services and one which in time of
war is as essential a part of the national defences
as the Royal Navy itself.
1 60
CHAPTER XII
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
What is our Imperial Defence policy ? What is
the defence relationship between Great Britain
and the Dominions ? Does this country still
regard itself as the guardian of the whole Common-
wealth, bound to come to the assistance of any
threatened section of it, whether Colonial or
Dominion ? Or does it regard the British forces
as maintained primarily for the defence of the
British Isles ? And what corresponding attitude
do the different Dominions take up ?
The answers to the majority of these questions
are difficult to obtain. We know that the Statute
of Westminster has theoretically turned the
Dominions into independent sovereign States, free
to engage in or abstain from a war in which
Britain or any other fellow-Dominion might be
involved. More than one of the Dominions
have so far appreciated this aspect of their duly
registered freedom as openly to declare that
they would not necessarily feel committed by a
British declaration of war, and would not allow
i6i
SEA POWKR IN THE NEXT WAR
themselves to be so committed unless their own
positive interests were involved. Our own British
attitude remains undeclared. My impression is
that there remains among the mass of the people
of this country a considerable residue of the old
sentiment of Imperial trusteeship, even if the
Statute ""of Westminster has removed their legal
responsibility. Moreover, certain of the state-
ments made by Dominion statesmen on return
from the Coronation celebrations last year lend
colour to the possibility that some guarantee of
protection may have been given by the British
Government to some at least of their Dominion
colleagues. For instance, the Prime Minister of
Australia, in a report to the Commonwealth
Parliament on August 24th last, was stated in The
Times to have said that :
" the safety of Imperial interests in the Eastern
hemisphere depended on the presence at Singa-
pore of a fleet adequate to secure sea com-
munications. The necessary strength existed
for this purpose. It was obvious that the
United Kingdom Government would not spend
a huge sum on a fleet base at Singapore if it
did not intend to safeguard such communica-
tions should the need arise and, in the process,
safeguard Australia.
" It was outstanding in military history that
162
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
the future of overseas territories was always
decided by the outcome of war in the main
theatre, which for Austraha meant a struggle
between British and enemy fleets for the control
of the sea communications. Australians were
unlikely to accept a policy of non-co-operation
depriving them of Great Britain's powerful aid
in these uncertain times."
The whole tenor of this statement is strongly
suggestive of an assurance having been given to
Mr. Lyons while in London that the British fleet
w^ould come to the aid of Australia if she were
attacked.
But though our inclinations may be all in favour
of our hurrying to the aid of any threatened
portion of the Commonwealth, we ought to be
quite certain, before we assure any Dominion of
our helpful intentions, that we are fully able to
honour them, and that we are not merely allowing
our Imperial enthusiasms to run away with our
judgment. There is one passage at least in the
report of the Australian Prime Minister's speech
quoted on the previous page that gives cause for
apprehension as to whether the difficulties in the
way of our acting as the general Imperial protector
are properly appreciated. When Mr. Lyons said
that " it was outstanding in military history that
the future of oversea territories was always
163
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
decided by the outcome of war in the main
theatre," we may reasonably conclude that he was
enunciating a proposition with which the British
authorities were in agreement, if indeed they
were not the originators of it. If so, there is
cause to fear that the responsible authorities
may ftave failed to perceive the fundamental
change that has come over the strategical situation
of the Empire, consequent on the rise of Japan
as a great naval power and the abrogation of the
Anglo-Japanese alliance. For, as we saw in
Chapter III, this change completely falsifies the
traditional principle that the safety of oversea
territories is decided in the main theatre ; and
for the reason that there are now two main
theatres of war to be reckoned with, one at
Home and one in the Far East. If our Admiralty
has failed to realise the profound significance of
this new situation, and the passage in Mr. Lyons'
speech suggests that it has, then there seems
to be a strong possibility that our Imperial
strategy is being framed on out-of-date premises.
In view of that possibility, we shall do well to
examine the practicability of our being able to
afford the assistance to Australia (and presumably
also New Zealand) that we may have promised
them.
If we send the fleet to the Far East in sufficient
strength to dispute the command at sea with the
164
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
Japanese, what must that strength be ? The
Japanese capital ships now number nine. In
the last war a fifty per cent, superiority in capital
ships was deemed barely sufficient to ensure
our command at sea against the Germans. If
we reduce that necessary superiority to as low
as thirty per cent, for our Far Eastern force, we
should need to send out at the very least twelve
capital ships. Two of our fifteen capital ships
being under reconstruction, this means that at the
moment the whole of our capital ship fleet but
one would have to proceed eastward. With the
bulk of the fleet 10,000 miles from Europe and
only one battleship left to deal with, would it not
be a terrible temptation to Italy with four battle-
ships and Germany with three pocket ones to try
to get the better of us while our main strength
was occupied elsewhere, and so to gather in
what Mr. Churchill has called " the fattest spoil
and plunder available to the have-not nations " ?
When the present building and reconstruction
programmes are completed, the position would
be no better ; for we should then have to send
eastwards at least seventeen ships to meet thirteen
Japanese, leaving five at home to compete with
eight Italian and six^ German. Judged in terms
of small ships, the position would be equally
1 Counting the three German pocket battleships as equal to
one Nelson.
165
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
difficult. If the battleships went to the East they
would take a good many cruisers and sixty or
seventy of the destroyers with them. This would
now leave eighty or ninety destroyers at home, in
face of a hundred Italian and twenty German.
Neither by large nor small ship standards,
therefore> could we conduct an offensive naval
campaign in Far Eastern waters, either now or
in the measurable future, and retain the com-
mand at sea in European waters at the same
time. It is, of course, probably true that if both
Italy and Germany were hostile, France would
be friendly. Could we in that case contemplate
handing over our security in home waters to her,
while our own fleet went eastward to deal with
the Japanese ? It is a question that I have heard
answ^ered in the affirmative by naval officers of
seniority and distinction. To me, however, it
is frankly unthinkable. I cannot conceive it
possible that we should be so incautious as to
entrust our own island security to the keeping
of a foreign country. What if she failed us ?
What if our shores were invaded or our vital
supplies cut off because her protection proved
less effective than we had hoped ? We had to
exert our last ounce of strength to defeat the
German submarine campaign in the last war.
Could we reasonably expect any foreign nation to
make a like desperate effort on someone else's
1 66
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
behalf ? We should surely be excessively con-
fiding if we did.
To take the converse case, could we expect the
French to be willing to send the whole of their
field army to Cochin China, leaving the frontiers
of France to be defended only by British soldiers ?
Assuredly not. There is even evidence for thinking
that they would be averse to entrusting their far
less vital sea communications to our care. Speak-
ing at Nice last year, M. Pietri, a former Minister
of Marine, said that " to leave our naval defence
to Britain would clearly be to sign our death
warrant as a naval power. The work of the
British fleet is not the same as ours, which is to
undertake the transport of troops to and from
Africa."
There can, in fact, be no doubt that the defence
of Britain and of the vital overseas supplies
without which she must quickly collapse are a
first charge on the British fleet. Any other
conclusion is to ignore human nature. It is really
impossible to think that the British public, even
where it harboured the warmest feelings of
solicitude for the welfare of the Dominions,
would consent to see the best part, if not all, of
the fleet that it had paid vast sums to build
and maintain disappearing through the Suez
Canal, when its disappearance would leave the
British Isles themselves in grave danger. That
167
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
would surely be to make far too meagre an
allowance for the instinct of self-preservation.
We should never dream of expecting the
Dominions to act like that towards us. We
should therefore be equally realists in our attitude
towards them. Nor should we really be consulting
their true interests if we were quixotically to
hazard our own security in order to come to their
aid. For if Britain goes down, the Empire goes
down with her.
We must therefore face the likelihood that, in
any circumstances that can reasonably be fore-
seen, we cannot send a battle fleet to the East
capable of seizing and holding the command at
sea and therefore of controlling the sea com-
munications. Does this mean that we should
be unable to come to the support of Australia and
New Zealand if they were attacked ? Not neces-
sarily ; but it does mean that we could not
aid them to the extent that they may have been
led to expect. And that means that they would
have to rely on their own resources to a much
greater degree than hitherto.
Indeed, a policy for the Dominions aiming at
self-sufficiency in defence seems a desirable one
from several points of view. It is, for one thing,
the logical corollary of the Statute of Westminster.
The Dominions having demanded and obtained
their legal sovereignty, the only satisfactory and
i68
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
honest procedure is for them to assume to the
full all the responsibilities of sovereignty at the
same time as they enjoy its advantages. For them
to claim freedom to decide whether or not they
will fight in any of Britain's wars, and at the
same time to rely on British arms for their own
defence, is neither fair to us nor good for them-
selves ; and for us to encourage them to continue
to lean on parental support long after they have
been acknowledged to have reached man's estate
is equally unfair to them. The more, therefore,
that each Dominion can be self-defending, the
better for its moral stature.
While, however, a general policy of individual
self-reliance may be commended as the right one
for the Commonwealth as a whole, there is no
reason why this should rule out mutual support ;
but it should be mutual support based on com-
munity of interest and real equality of status,
and not a disguised tutelage masquerading as
friendship.
What, then, should be a naval defence policy
for the Empire based on these principles }
Taking Britain's own problem first, we are pro-
bably safe in ruling out the United States as a
possible enemy. That leaves us with two primary
responsibilities, our own British security and
the protection of our Colonies and India ; and
two primary points of danger, Europe and the
M 169 1
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Far East. Strength in home waters covers both
of our responsibilities against a European enemy,
but leaves certain of our Colonies open to attack
by Japan. As previously demonstrated, however,
we cannot be in superior force both at home
and ii\ the Far East simultaneously, and since
we have agreed that safety at home is the para-
mount consideration, it follows that our correct
British policy is superiority in European waters
and a defensive policy in the East. In that case,
what form should this defensive policy take ? If
we count France as being friendly, we should
require enough battleships in European waters
to meet a possibly hostile combination of Germany
and Italy. That means that we need seven or
eight capital ships in European waters now and
seventeen or eighteen in three or four years' time.
In both cases, we should have four to six capital
ships surplus to European requirements and
available therefore for a Far Eastern fleet. The
large battleship, however, is ill-adapted for
defensive work. It is a weapon of combat, and
attempts to use it defensively have registered
consistent failure. The battleships of the Russian
Port Arthur fleet ended an inglorious career by
being sunk at anchor. The Germ.an battleships,
after remaining in harbour for most of the war,
committed suicide in Scapa Flow. It is the
smaller vessels, the destroyers and submarines,
170
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
that must be relied on for defensive work. We
have indeed suggested in a previous chapter that
they are of greater value than the great ship for
offensive work as well. The arguments in this
chapter are developed, however, on the ruling
assumption that the great ship remains the measure
of naval strength. If it does not, then it is
comparatively a simple matter to substitute
corresponding calculations on the small ship
scale.
The further consideration of the Far Eastern
problem can usefully be postponed until we
come to deal with Australia and New Zealand.
Suffice it to say at this point, that the surplus of
four to six battleships which we have at our
disposal for a Far Eastern fleet do not seem very
suitable for the purpose.
Let us now go on to Canada. Against the very
unlikely contingency of a Japanese attack, she
must obviously stand on the defensive, and for
that purpose needs destroyers, submarines and
aircraft on her western seaboard. Since one of the
points where Britain could most fruitfully take
the offensive in a war against Japan would be the
eastern part of the north Pacific, a British force
of cruisers or destroyers should join the Canadian
one and the two should work together. Against
an attack from a European enemy, Canada is
adequately covered by the British European
171
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
fleet, just as the United States was covered
by that fleet against an attack by Germany in the
war. In order to take her recognised share in
warding off that danger, it is desirable that
Canada should maintain certain Canadian-
manned ships, say a flotilla of destroyers, as part
of the British fleet in Europe.
South Africa is also secured against attack
from Europe by the British European fleet. An
attack on her from the East is at present so remote
a danger that we can disregard it. For her, too,
an appropriate contribution would be a naval
unit working with the main fleet in Europe, while
we, on our part, might assist her financially with
the maintenance of the Simonstown naval base.
Whether the South African Government would
be willing to maintain a naval unit with the
British fleet is not a possibility that I would
care to bet on. But if that Government is not
so prepared, it should recognise that it is getting
cheap security from someone else.
Then we come to the Far East and to Australia
and New Zealand. On the general moral principle
that each Dominion should, if possible, furnish
its own defence, what could these two countries
do ? Neither singly nor in combination could
they hope to build a capital ship fleet capable of
dealing with the Japanese Navy. The cost of
the modern great ships, with all their attendant
172
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
cruisers, destroyers, and so on, would be far
beyond their resources. Nor could such a fleet
be completed by them even if we threw in as a
nucleus the four or five British battleships that
we have seen to be surplus to requirements at
home. It is clear, therefore, that a defensive
policy is their portion. Fortunately, however,
our previous investigations into the question of
invasion under modern conditions have indicated
that the defence has been growing steadily
stronger. Since, therefore, Australia and New
Zealand are largely self-contained as regards
food, defensive measures against invasion based
on destroyers, motor torpedo boats, submarines,
shore-based aircraft, and military forces should
have good chances of success. The present policy
of the Australian Government of a reliance on
naval defence based on the command at sea can
hardly be other than a mistaken one. The com-
mand at sea implies a superior navy, and as
Australia cannot hope to possess a fleet superior
to the Japanese by herself and as the chances
of her receiving British reinforcements to that
extent are, as we have seen, problematical, she
seems to be following a policy that is optimistic
to the verge of unreality. Her cruiser fleet
on which she is spending a lot of money can be of
little use to her. Being primarily gun vessels,
they would be helpless against the Japanese
173
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
capital ships ; whereas torpedo-carrying craft
and minelayers would at least have a chance of
dealing the big ships a mortal blow. The dividend
she is likely to obtain from destroyers, sub-
marines, bombers and minelayers is surely much
more pro^jiising.
Apart from the primary danger of invasion,
Australia and New Zealand have the protection
of their trade to consider ; and here their interests
meet and mingle with those of Britain. The
latter's problem in Eastern waters consists of
the protection of India, the Straits Settlements,
Borneo, Hong Kong and other of her territorial
possessions, and also of her Eastern trade. Singa-
pore is frequently spoken of as the key to this
problem, but it is important to note that that
description is only partly true. Singapore cer-
tainly covers India, Ceylon and the Straits
Settlements. It partly covers Australia and New
Zealand, in that a force proceeding to attack
either of them would have to leave Singapore
on its flank and to have, therefore, its communi-
cations open to flank attack. A force operating
from Singapore might also be able to protect
British North Borneo. But no naval force at
Singapore, however strong, can cover Hong
Kong ; because Hong Kong is too far beyond it
to receive cover against the Japanese. Should
Japan therefore take it into her head to attack
174
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
US, the odds are that she would be able to take
Hong Kong and that we should be unable to
prevent her. We should not, however, regard
that possibility as implying the first stage in the
break-up of the Empire. There are other ways of
striking at Japan besides fighting a fleet action
against her in waters where all the advantages
would be with her and against us. There is, in
fact, good reason to anticipate that even if we lost
Hong Kong to start with, we might recover it
later on. Our West Indian possessions were
constantly changing hands in this way in former
times. St. Lucia, for instance, was passed back-
wards and forwards between us and the French
no less than nine times between 1762 and 1803.
Our China trade would probably go, too, but as it
constitutes only 2 to 3 per cent, of our total
trade the loss could not be regarded as vitally
crippling.
We could, however, reasonably aim to hold the
general line Singapore-New Zealand and to
protect the trade inside that line. The protection
of trade under these conditions would mean
oceanic convoys, and both for these and for the
defence of territory we have argued in this and
previous chapters that destroyers, submarines
and aircraft are the most suitable agents. All
our conclusions point, therefore, to the chief
naval Far Eastern requirements of Britain,
175
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
Australia and New Zealand to be small craft —
destroyers, submarines and aircraft, together with
minelayers. These classes of vessel are, moreover,
much more appropriately related to the ex-
chequers of the latter countries than cruisers or
battle-cruisers. What, for instance, could Australia
do with one or two battle-cruisers ? Nothmg
at all except to send them into action against
a probably superior force of Japanese battleships,
in which they would almost certainly come off
worst. But a force of thirty or forty destroyers
and fifteen or twenty submarines should not be
beyond Australian resources and would be a
much more effective instrument. Pooling the
resources of Australia, New Zealand and Britain's
Far Eastern contingent, we might well reach a
combined force of 150 destroyers, and 60 or 70
submarines without going much beyond present
expenditure. Such a body of ships would un-
doubtedly be a good deal more formidable than a
mixed collection of five or six battleships, nine
or ten cruisers, and twenty or thirty destroyers,
which is the sort of surface fleet we might expect
to be able to deploy in Eastern waters under
existing strategical ideas.
It is such a force of small craft, therefore, that
we seem to need in Eastern waters. And there
is no doubt that it should be permanently stationed
there. The idea of sending the fleet out to the
176
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
East from Home waters in wartime is fundamen-
tally unsound. In the first place, there could never
be any certainty that, when the time came, it
would be able to go ; and the Dominions who
might have counted on its coming might thereby
be left unexpectedly in the lurch. Secondly, it
would take many weeks to arrive and might well
arrive too late. Thirdly, the arrangement pre-
vents anything like proper training. The British
contingent straight out from Home waters would
be fighting in waters unfamiliar to officers and
men, and would have to co-operate with Dominion
forces whom they had never previously met.
Every consideration of strategy and efficiency
calls in fact for a permanent Far Eastern fleet,
consisting of British, Australian and New Zealand
vessels working together.
In writing this chapter, I have been unable
to contribute to the prevalent conception of the
British main fleet steaming in full force about the
world, ready to deal out crushing blows wherever
it went. That is an all-too-popular idea of the
Navy's capabilities, especially dear to those who
harbour animosities against Japan. It is an
idea that Sir Samuel Hoare certainly encouraged
by his talk of a " two-hemisphere " fleet (there
I am criticising Sir Samuel again), but I believe
it to be none the less a fanciful one. It is hardly
to be expected that the fleet could proceed in
177
SEA POWER IN THE NEXT WAR
greatly superior force to the Far East, demolish
the Japanese fleet, and then return in triumph
to do the same thing to, say, Germany. Things
are hardly as simple as that. While the fleet was
delivering a smashing stroke in one part of
the worlcj, nations elsewhere who might antici-
pate similar attentions later on are unlikely to be
waiting fatalistically for the blow to fall. The
European theatre of war will always be for this
country the main theatre, and if the British public
insists on the bulk of the fleet remaining in
European waters, it will be correct in doing so.
The protection of the British Isles is the main
purpose for which the fleet exists and nothing can
justify that purpose being neglected.
I started this book with a reminder of how the
value of sea power was misappreciated in the
recent past. In the present anxious state of the
world, there seems to be a danger of the same
thing happening. Many responsible people have
quite recently been saying that the domination
of Europe by Germany would open the way for
her to world conquest. It may be a useful correct-
ive to cast our minds back to a parallel contin-
gency 133 years ago. Napoleon had over-run
Europe. But his Grand Army could take him no
farther than Europe ; and the reason lay, as a
distinguished American naval officer has pointed
out in a celebrated phrase, in the far distant and
178
THE IMPERIAL DEFENCE PROBLEM
Storm-beaten ships of the British fleet which
" stood between it and the dominion of the
world."
There are people who say that air attack
has altered all that and that we are now exposed to
invasion and defeat by air. They may be right,
but there is so far no evidence to show that they
are. The Spanish and Chinese wars have been
going on for some time and much bombing of
civil populations or open towns has taken place,
especially at Canton which, if not as large as
London, is certainly more crowded. But in
neither of these wars has a combatant yet been
brought to subjection by these means. It would
be unwise to overlook the possibility that, in
certain circumstances, air attack alone might be
decisive. It were equally unwise to ignore that
up to now it has only played an auxiliary role,
and one which competent observers aver to have
had the effect of stiffening, rather than weakening,
the resistance of the enemy nation. And that
being the present state of the case, it does not
seem that we can yet afford to neglect the admoni-
tion of Lord Halifax in 1694, recently reiterated
by Admiral Sir Barry Domville : " Englishmen,
look to your moat."
179
INDEX
Abyssinia
Aden
Air attack on convoys
Aircraft carriers
Anglo-Japanese Alliance
Anti-aircraft gunfire
Anti-submarine apparatus
" Army of England "
Australia
, Prime Minister
" Balanced ship "
Baltic .
Bases
Basilisk episode
Beatty, Admiral
Bombay
Bomb V. battleship .
Borneo, Br. North .
Camperdown
Canada .
Canton
Cape route
Ceylon .
Chinese War
Committee on Design, 1871
Contraband .
Convoy
, escorts .
Cost of battleships .
destroyers
Cruisers
87.
"3:
163,
94-7. I
181
46, 117
. 117
. 129
67, 109
39, 41, 164
66,67
58,59
. 81
[68, 171-177
162
149-15 1
• 117
77, 148, 149
. 61
30, 125
. 114
• 73
• 174
. 116
.171-2
• 179
•I 13-4
• 174
70, 179
• 135
9
7,94
22, 130, 154
.138-9
.138-9
.120-3
INDEX
Cniising system
Cyprus
Dardanelles expedition
Daily Telegraph
" Decisive weapon" theory
Dciitschland
Disarmament Conference
Domville, Admiral
Dover Patrol
Drake .
Eden, Mr.
Egypt .
Escorts, convoy
Etherton, Lt.-Col. .
Far Eastern Fleet
Fireships
Fisher, Lord .
Foch
French bases
fleet
Gallipoli
Gautreau, M.
Geneva Naval Conference
German Sortie of August i8th,
German Submarine Campaign
Gibraltar
Grand Fleet
Halifax, Lord
High Seas Fleet
Hoare, Sir Samuel
Hong Kong .
India .
International Law
Ireland, raids on
Italian Fleet .
916
94-7. I
22, 13
m
116
140
44
26-8
14-16, 98
109, 118
5, 6, 10, 14, 19, 23
PAGE
7
"5
82
140
30
74
45
179
5
144
"3
"5
0, 154
93
177
1, 144
30
I
2, 118
1 1 1-2
182
. 179
6, 10, 12, 13, 21-2, 24, 27
59, 66, 95, 147, 148, 177
•174-5
114, 169, 174
90
.... ol
107
INDEX
Jellicoe, Admiral
Jutland .
Kelly, Admiral .
Libya .
London Docks
London Naval Conference
Lyons, Mr.
Malta .
Mediterranean
Memorandum, Jellicoe's
Merchant tonnage .
Mines .
Napoleon
Nelson .
New Zealand .
Non-contact mine .
torpedo .
Northern Patrol
North Sea
November 17th, 19 17, Action of
Oesel Island Expedition
Oil fuel
Oil firing
Palestine
Pantellaria Channel
Patrolling
Pietri, M.
Port Arthur Fleet .
Port of London
Prestige
Protection of Ships
Rearmament programmes
Richmond, Admiral
Russians
12,21-2,25-7,29, 30, 33, no
20-6, 141
60
87
113
183
107,
118
99-
-104
•
44
163
77.
"5
107-
-118
•
24
II, 18
154
,28
81,
178
• 143-4
68, 171-7
57
57
>73
5
5.6
28
82
60,
115
"5.
154
• 115
. 108-9
7> 16,
120
167
170
99-
-104
116
137
49
105,
121
19.
144
INDEX
St. Lucia
PACE
St. Vincent .
116
Scajt;i Flow
5. 6, 12, 170
Scheer, .Admiral
21
Simonstown .
. 172
Singapore
. 39, 41, 162, 174
Sloops .
• 130
Small ships
• 15
. 16, 17, 32, 33, 76, 106
South Africa .
. 172
Spanish Armada
. 144
War
69, 179
Statute of Westminster
. i6i, 168
Storage .
.156-8
Straits Settlements
. 114. 174
Submarines .
II, 12-17, 19, 126, 127
Suez route
113, 114
Thames Estuary .
99-104
Times, The .
. 162
Times, Naval Correspondent
• 123
Torpedo
• •
. 18,24-5
Trafalgar
■ •
. 125, 134
Underwater weapons
18, 29, 31, 72
Unrestricted submarine
warfare
48, 90
U.S.A. .
•
36, 169
Washington Conference
37>90
Wilson, Sir Henry .
•
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